land art and isolation

Prescript: I originally started writing this with the intent to send it out to my supporter's newsletter, EYES ONLY, but it got to be long and took basically all day so I feel like it deserves wider circulation. You will have to tolerate that it begins in the more conversational tone I use for the supporters newsletter. I am going to write a bit about some related local works of art and send that to EYES ONLY instead.

Over on pixelfed I posted these two photos.

It's Saturday morning, I have coffee and the cat is here and the work thing I was planning to do has mercifully turned out to not need to be done today, so I have time to kill. Let's talk a little bit about Art before I take on a real project for the day.

So let's talk about the photos first, and then we'll sort of widen our view to the big picture. Neither photo is that good, tbh, I really enjoy architectural photography but I rarely have more than my phone. It's actually rather difficult to find any good angles to photograph this particular corner from anyway, which is one of the common criticisms of it as a work of art. But I have to actually say what it is! It's a corner of the upper floor of The Shops at Crystals, an upscale shopping center attached to the Aria on the Las Vegas strip. It opened in '09, and the building was designed by prominent architect Daniel Libeskind. It is, in my opinion, not really that interesting of a building. It has a combination of dead mall vibes and Las Vegas energy that is not all that compelling, and it doesn't have the surrealism of The Forum Shops at Caesars, the Las Vegas destination I recommend if you want to see a real shopping mall situation. But, it is connected to an APM (the Aria Express), and I will take the slimmest of excuses to ride an APM.

There aren't a lot of good things I can say about Las Vegas architecture, but one compliment I can extend is that the casino developers have mostly retained a tradition of commissioning fine art for their buildings. Nothing can really unseat Dale Chihuly's "Fiori di Como," the 2,000 square foot, 40,000 pound glass sculpture that occupies the ceiling of the Bellagio's lobby. But the Shops at Crystals took a pleasingly modernist direction by commissioning James Turrell. Turrell is probably the most prominent member of the "Light and Space movement," which can be simply described as an installation art view of architecture with a particular emphasis on architectural lighting. Turrell's portfolio includes an array of works he calls "Skyspaces," often vaguely gazebo-like structures with apertures in their ceilings intended to frame the sky as if it were a canvas. Most examples are in private ownership, the only one I have seen is "Dividing the Light" at Pomona College (Turrel's alma mater) in Claremont, California. I do recommend a visit.

There's something important to understand about the Skyspaces: the idea is more or less that the art is the sky, and the space is only there to structure your perception of it. Turrell has described them as naked-eye observatories. The naked-eye observatory has a long tradition, perhaps unsurprisingly, since it was the only kind of observatory until the development of the telescope. Stonehenge is a rather famous one (I am referring, of course, to the Stonehenge of Odessa, Texas. What else?). A lot of Turrell's work is like this, creating a space to structure your view of the world beyond it, and he is particularly interested in the sky as a subject. Stick a pin in that.

So back to the shopping mall. Turrell did a scattering of different projects for the Crystals (I am hereforward dropping "The Shops At" for sanity), including the monorail station. Now, I know you are thinking, what could possibly appeal to me more than a James Turrell monorail station? Why have I not up and moved to Las Vegas to devote my life to the preservation and interpretation of this remarkable artifact?

Well, because it kind of sucks, is why. Almost all of the work Turrell did at the Crystals feels badly hampered by the design of the larger building and the practical necessities of an upscale shopping mall. It's hard to produce that remarkable of a perceptual experience in a wide, crowded hallway. The monorail station doesn't even always have Turrell's lighting turned on, is my experience. What stands out more is the space I photographed, basically an awkward mezzanine floor that exists mainly to be a hallway to the monorail station. You can't help but feel that it was handed over to Turrell because they realized they'd made a mistake and there wasn't really anything else they could do with the square footage. If you're in Las Vegas I would go to the Crystals and take a look, because it is something, but it's a very long ways from a masterpiece. Pretty much every view of it is intermediated by escalators or food court signage, it's jarringly out of context, and exists in a broadly uncomfortable part of the building that is too far from the ground floor to appeal to shops. Instead, it hosts a traveling exhibition on Princess Diana. And if that's not dead mall energy, I don't know what is.

So why are we talking about this, besides that I get to gush a little about Turrell? Well, I really wanted to talk a little bit about land art, and I think these smaller Turrell works are a good inroads. Land art can be succinctly described as art that makes use of, or consists of, the landscape. One of the prototypical works of land art is the Spiral Jetty, built by Robert Smithson on the shores of the Great Salt Lake. It is what it says on the tin, a rock jetty that reaches out into the lake before turning in on itself in a tightening spiral. It was installed in 1970 and wore away with time, so for many years it was completely submerged below the water. But the water is now receding, and it is revealed once again, as a faint rock spiral in a dry plain. There is some active debate over whether or not it would be appropriate to make repairs. It is often an accepted part of land art that it will change over time due to natural processes. At the same time, the Spiral Jetty's exact fate (to be submerged and then later beached, as it were) was not foreseen and is largely a result of human disruption of the ecosystem. So you can make arguments either way.

In any case, it is an interesting aspect of the work (which merits a discussion that makes up more than half of the Wikipedia page) that it exists, today, mostly in the form of photographs. For much of its history it was entirely invisible, and more recently it has reemerged, but in a severely eroded state. If you are killing time in Utah on the wrong side of the lake, say because you have been at the nearby Golden Spike National Historic Park, you should go see it. Or perhaps not see it, as it no longer resembles Smithson's original creation. This is, ultimately, the fate of all land art, as it is the fate of the land. Think about that while you look at it.

One of the most famous works of landscape art is Walter De Maria's "The Lightning Field," in Catron County, New Mexico. The Lightning Field has something in common with the Spiral Jetty and several other prominent works of land art: the Dia Art Foundation. Dia was founded in New York City in the '70s with Schlumberger money, and had a rather explicit mission of funding art works that are particularly expensive. This focus on large projects and the timing of their heyday lead them naturally to land art. I would wager, just off the top of my head, that roughly half of the prominent works of land art in the United States are owned by Dia.

Land art really is big, and that can be its undoing. Turrell's Skyspace at Pomona ran over $2 million, and it's not even really land art, I'm just making a connection there in service of what I originally set out to talk about but still haven't gotten to. I'm not sure if the total original cost of The Lightning Field has been publicized, but it relied on grant funding from multiple art foundations and the state, and a refurbishment about a decade ago ran nearly half a million.

But, well, let's be real, it's not that unusual for original works of fine art to run into the millions, and that's especially true of sculpture which often requires fairly sophisticated fabrication and installation techniques. Land art at its best tends to rely on sophisticated construction techniques, as well. The Lightning Field, for example, required five months of extensive surveying by land and air. Part of this was to produce what we would now call a digital elevation map, in order to create the field's flat top despite the varying terrain.

I am sort of purposely not describing The Lightning Field here. It's not that it defies explanation, it's actually very easy to describe. In an article that De Maria wrote himself for "Art Forum" to describe the project, he says that "the sum of the facts does not constitute the work or determine its esthetics." This is sort of a pretentious thing for a sculptor to say before rattling off a bunch of large numbers, but he has a point: The Lightning Field is literally a bunch of poles stuck in the ground, which is easy to tell you, but gives you very little idea of what it is actually like.

This is a common and important aspect of land art. When I worked for Meow Wolf, we talked a lot about "immersive art," which is pretty much the term that has come to describe "whatever Meow Wolf is." If we allow ourselves some rose-colored glasses, most land art projects were a form of immersive art, an earlier form that seems to predate the forthright commercialization of the projects I got to work on, like Meow Wolf's Omega Mart. To be fair, the commercialization is part of the work, but it sure is on display. Immersive art means that "you have to be there," and "you have to be there" is a great opportunity for the real estate developer.

Ah, but this is indeed a rosy view of the past. There is another very interesting trait of prominent works of land art. Since I have done such a paltry job of describing The Lightning Field, go ahead and look up some photos. They're worth a thousand words, and so you'll get... several thousand words of information. You will quickly notice that there are very few photos of The Lightning Field, and some of them turn out to be crops or recolors of the others. The Dia Art Foundation, apparently according to Walter De Maria's wishes, prohibits photography, or even the presence of cameras.

I have never been to The Lightning Field. This is also a surprise, I'm in Catron County reasonably often. But it costs either $250 or $150 to visit depending on the season, and the larger issue I have encountered is that the visiting nights sell out immediately.

There is no public access to The Lightning Field. You have to make arrangements with Dia to stay the night at a cabin on the property. Lots of people do this and end up writing travelogues about how the experience changed them, and God knows that I probably will too, some day. But after reading enough of these travelogues you start to go a little mad. You are reading someone else's accounting of an experience---something that is fundamentally an experience, not a sight or a sound, not even space or light---that you have not had and probably never will. It's like when you meet someone and the main and only thing they have to talk about is their nomadic travels of Europe, but instead of the routine lifestyle of people with Silicon Valley salaries and few attachments, it is supposedly a great work of art. Like photographs of the spiral jetty, personal essays of The Lightning Fields describe something that hardly exists.

The magazine articles replace the art.

The charmingly-named journal "Art World Follies" featured an essay about The Lightning Fields by art historian John Beardsley. It is titled "Art and Authoritarianism." It's an exercise in self-control to not quote nearly the entire thing here, but it is available on JSTOR if you have just three pages worth of time to kill. Let me take just this, from the introduction:

...The directive posture assumed toward the viewer by De Maria and Dia suggests that both artist and patron lack confidence in either the quality of the work or the discernment of the viewer.

I can respect that Dia has certain practical concerns that encourage them to limit access to the site, such as preservation of both the artwork and the delicate desert ecosystem that it incorporates. But Beardsley points out that, like most landscape art, The Lightning Field is in a remote location. Distance and unimproved roads provide a natural limiting effect on visitation to these sites; I've been to the Spiral Jetty several times and seldom seen more than one other visitor around---fewer than are permitted to stay at The Lightning Field each night. And that's another Dia-owned site, although not one originally commissioned by them. They clearly do not apply such restrictive measures to everything.

It might be tempting to attribute it to finances, especially after seeing Beardsley complain about the required $30 donation, which has gone up by 500% at the least. I do think that Dia has some financial struggles, but no doubt they could raise more revenue by accepting more visitors to the site.

So, while it is tempting to blame Dia for their restrictive attitude, it's clear that Walter De Maria shares in the fault. Many of the restrictions are in place at his request; the whole notion that you can only see the artwork through a 24-hour stay in a remote cabin to which you were transported by Dia staff was apparently part of his vision.

Artist's vision or not, it is an affront to the public.

There are no doubt some regional politics at play. I cannot help but view Dia with skepticism. Dia is a high-society NYC institution with galleries in New York and, incongruously, several of its most prominent holdings in remote parts of Utah and New Mexico. That land art requires land is self-evident, but it also tends to require a degree of isolation. The most prominent and ambitious land art projects, even when conceptualized in the more populous East, tend to be actualized in the West. Here, land is our most important asset, and in places like Catron County, it often seems to be our only asset.

So you can see the appeal to land artists. But you can also see the indignation when those land artists claim the very land as their art, and keep it for themselves.

To say that The Lightning Field is a betrayal of Western values is probably a little over the top. Besides, it takes only a casual reference to the Bundys to show that those values are not universal. But it is fair to say that the kind of person who travels the west and is interested in land art is the type of person who is interested in the land itself, and holds it dearly. There is something unbearable about Walter De Maria, an artist from and in New York City, making his most famous work out of a slice of our desert and then narrowly dictating the terms on which we can see it.

The earth did not set forth one hundred thousand acres of lava across El Malpais and then establish an elaborate booking policy, except that you must put in the effort to cross such difficult terrain. The beautiful and unique Quebradas are remote but open to anyone willing to make the trip. De Maria seems to view his work as part of this tradition: "the land is not the setting for the work but a part of the work." And yet he apparently thinks of himself as being far above it.

Much of the beauty of the land is in the discovery. De Maria writes that "the sky-ground relationship is central to the work." Anyone who loves the desert can tell you that the sky-ground relationship is different everywhere you look, that it does not photograph well but must be experienced, that the most important and striking examples of it are found by chance, or by the dedication of long hours spent looking. Yet The Lightning Field, ironically, offers no such experience. It is intensely curated, guarded by Dia's many restrictions, relentlessly interpreted for its scant audience by the demands its now-dead creator makes of them. "Isolation is the essence of Land Art," he said.

Smithson built the Spiral Jetty and then walked away. It is technically owned by Dia but you would be hard-pressed to tell it apart from the public land that surrounds it. It is, nonetheless, truly isolated. At the lightning field, they make a show of leaving visitors on their own, but in a way that provides the exact opposite message: you are being allowed to glimpse something special, but only on its creator's terms, a creator who has made very certain that his presence will not be forgotten.

I shouldn't be too hard on the Dia foundation. Not only the Spiral Jetty, but also Nancy Holt's "Sun Tunnels" are owned by Dia and open to the public in the way typical of things found in the desert. Like the land itself, they leave it to the visitor to have an experience of their own.

Unfortunately, this demand for isolation that turns to isolationism has become too typical of land art.

We started, you might remember, with James Turrell. His work at the Crystals is open to the public in the most commercial sense possible, perhaps to its detriment. Even there, he has made a concession to isolationism. By far the best part of his multi-installation work there, titled "Akhob," was upstairs in the Luis Vuitton. Access required not only a reservation but passing muster with the high-end store's doorman. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have survived COVID: Luis Vuitton stopped advertising Akhob in 2021 and, today, its fate is unknown besides that there is no access. Like the submerged Spiral Jetty, we can experience it only by photos, unless perhaps some shift in the economy causes the waters to recede.

Turrell, as you might suspect, can be viewed as a land artist. The Skyspaces have a natural connection to the land art movement, and as Turrell became more ambitious, his projects became larger, taking on the scale of landforms. Since 1979, Turrell has been working on "Roden Crater." It is a cindercone near Flagstaff that may one day become the greatest of the Skyspaces, excavated and reconstructed as a naked-eye observatory.

It is a huge vision that has faced a great deal of struggle. Despite many announced opening dates, it remained "under construction," closed to the public for 45 years. More recently, a $10 million donation from Kanye West and a partnership program with Arizona State University have brought in renewed funding, but a "tentative opening date" of 2024 looks set to pass just like the last five. In the mean time, it is mainly ASU students (a few of which have been entitled to visit the site by ASU's partnership agreement) and celebrities that have been found worthy. Besides Kanye West, with Kim Kardashian as a +1, Drake recently used Roden Crater as an Instagram backdrop. Clearly, the mandatory donation to experience the isolation of Roden Crater is a great deal more than $250. Perhaps I shouldn't be so cynical, but the main benefactor of Roden Crater is the Dia Art Foundation, and plans call for a set of cabins by which visitors will experience it.

Massive land art projects have a tendency towards vaporware, but that's not to say that they never escape. Michael Heizer's "City" is in a similar vein to Roden Crater, also initiated in the 1970s, also blowing through its proposed opening dates, also admitting no visitors due to its incompleteness. But City made it out: in 2022, it was finally declared open. It is managed by the Triple Aught Foundation, which has apparently learned a thing or two from Dia.

Triple Aught Foundation, the 501(c)(3) that oversees and operates Michael Heizer's City, has complete discretion as to the acceptance of any visitor request. City is located on private property and only invited guests are permitted on the property. All other visitors will be denied access to the property. Invited guests must advise Triple Aught Foundation of any medical conditions. The sculpture City is a registered work, protected by federal copyright law. Triple Aught Foundation has a strict copyright enforcement policy regarding unauthorized photographing or filming of the work. No unauthorized reproductions, public display or distribution of copies of the work, in whole or in part are permitted. Anyone violating this policy will be immediately asked to leave.

Only six visitors are allowed per day, three days a week, for a maximum of three hours, weather permitting, for a fee of $150, from May to November. Reservations are available on a strictly first-come-first-served basis.

You, I can say with a fair degree of confidence, will only ever experience City in the form of the few photographs the Triple Aught Foundation has seen fit to release. The Lightning Field, Roden Crater, they are all submerged, not by the waters of the Great Salt Lake but by the inability of their creators to let land art be like the land itself: unrestricted, unconfined, unassuming.

In the essay collection "LAND/ART New Mexico," curator Lucy Lippard writes that "I've come to the reluctant conclusion that Land Art is for city people."

I live between inhabited and mostly uninhabited areas---which makes this essay a kind of NIMBY rant: not in my backyard, not on my back forty. Given the fact that I have spent my life writing about art (sometimes Land Art), and ranting about the importance of public art, this sounds like a kind of betrayal. But it's hard to imagine what kind of art would work here, at the edge of a tiny village in north central New Mexico, looking out across a highway to private ranchlands and distant mountains. When I was a citydweller, I might have welcomed the sight of some visual extravagance, or oddity, or subtle highlights to my daily surroundings. But the fact remains that even semi-rural New Mexico is hard to improve upon.

Perhaps that's the problem, perhaps land art as a movement is fundamentally at odds with appreciation of the land itself. We might view Turrell, Smithson, De Maria, Heizer as entitled for thinking that the land needed their help. It is already art, and it always has been.

But we are humans, and we have always been inclined to interpret the land in the context of its impact on us, and our impact on it. So often that impact is happenstance, and more often for the worse than for the better. There must be some room to manipulate the land entirely by intent, in service of aesthetics and meaning rather than commercial exploitation. Indeed, the Land Art movement viewed itself in part as an anti-commercial backlash to the museums and galleries that held, and confined, so many forms of fine art. And yet, some of the greatest works of the movement are displayed in conditions more restrictive, more removed from the nature of the land, than the upper floor of a Las Vegas Luis Vuitton.

"Isolation is the essence of Land Art." I am inclined to agree. But isolation is not made, it is found. De Maria went to Catron County to seek it out, but somehow left thinking that he had created it. This is not New York City, you do not find space to think and experience behind a rope stanchion and a guest list. The land is already there, and land artists should trust their audience to experience it.