The Director of Public Affairs for the Art Institute of Chicago, Erin Hogan, "wanted something joyful and dreadful, fierce and high"(1). Considering where she works, that sounds like an easy enough itch to scratch. However, Hogan required something that can't be found in a museum. She felt the need to get out of her comfort zone, to get away from "being surrounded by a constant clamor of voices- of strangers, of friends-and el trains and car horns and music from passing cars and the rhythms of the boys drumming on overturned buckets on the sidewalk"(1). She "wanted to learn to enjoy being alone"(1).
Hoping to scratch this mix of itches, Hogan took a road trip to see some of the major pieces of American land art. She chronicles the experience in a thoughtful and entertaining book,Spiral Jetta, a mix of art criticism and travel narrative.
Originally, Hogan intended to visit Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels , Michael Heizer's Double Negative, James Turrell's Roden Crater, Walter De Maria's Lightning Fields, and Donald Judd's complex in Marfa, Texas. She drove a Jetta, hence the title of this occasionally punny book.
The art-criticism side of the book records the ways these classics of what is often referred to as Land Art matched and missed her expectations. Related to Minimalism, Land Art set out to disturb the relation between viewer and object. To the extent one can define it as a movement, Land Art aims to create experiences of the sublime.
With Land Art, size matters. Using the earth, actual landscapes as their canvas and material, the artists above set/created objects within natural spaces in the hopes of overwhelming and disorienting potential viewers. The resulting works not only wont fit in a museum, but, theoretically, the setting of the object is part of the art, integral to it. Object and setting are one; the created object can only achieve its effect within the natural environment in which the artist originally placed/created it. Ultimately, an atmosphere is sought. Ideally, within that atmosphere, the viewer experiences a dislocation. He or she loses a sense of self, inundated by the austerity and grandeur of their surroundings.
Despite the fact that the works highlighted are often thought of part of a movement, Hogan's direct experience of them tends to point toward their differences. Spiral Jetty is a more traditional piece of art; at it's core, there is an object, a design, that might be appreciated outside of the space it occupies.
However, the object achieves a greater expression by virtue of it's location on the shores of the Great Salt Lake. The lake has coated it over the years with a salt coating per Smithson's intention. Spiral Jetty was submerged under the lake for some years, only to resurface in 1999. Upsetting the notion of the artist, "the artists behind land art surrender control of their objects to natural processes"(28). Hogan also believes that the setting of Spiral Jetty is important in establishing the work's effect in another way. She describes Smithson's masterpiece as "a spiral of rocks and dirt approximately fifteen hundred feet long and fifty feet across"(2-3). Within museum walls, this would be a big, monumental piece. Yet, as Hogan presents it, set on the desolate shores of the Great Salt Lake, under the wide sky of its surroundings, Smithson's work seems almost forlorn, quaint. At the mercy of the elements, it's peristence amidst an indifferent setting acquires a pathos.
Double Negative, a long, interrupted, gash that Michael Heizer blasted onto the edge of a Mesa in Utah, is the opposite. Far from constituting an object, it is a vacancy that confronts viewers with the dwarfing magnitude and desolation of their surroundings. Unlike traditional artwork,it is impossible for a normal, grounded viewer to see it in it's entirety and at once. To do so, one must look down from far above, as in the picture immediately below.
With it Heizer intended to "defy the passage of time"(101). To this point, time has responded by continually eroding the clean lines Heizer intended for his gash. These works are meant to scar the land, to compel attention through their size and location. Critics have complained about the coercive and blatant nature of these works; they demand attention rather than compel it in a gentle and suasive fashion. Yet, Hogan discovers they're hard to find, even when she draws near them. She never does actually locate Sun Tunnels or Roden Crater. Writing of the travails involved in visiting Spiral Jetta, Hogan notes, "how could a work be described as intrusive...if one had to travel so far, so uncomfortably, and with such determination to see it"(23).
Many prove hard to 'find' figuratively speaking. Her experience of several of the pieces proves strangely deflating. Far from delivering moments of awe and shock as intended and expected, several of the pieces visited leave Hogan feeling underwhelmed. At one point, she confesses "I needed to come to terms with the fact that this monumental art of the 1970s had turned out to be less than transformative. I had yet to have an experience that truly lifted me out of mysef and reengaged me with a sense of awe and wonder"(122).
Then, some of it is just hard to find. Costing potentially 20 million dollars, Hogan describes James Turrell's Roden Crater as an "inverted planetarium" filled with interior caves from which "ethereal yet sculptural forms will appear"(107). Yet, despite it's size and cost, Hogan is unable to find anyone to show her the crater despite numerous attempts to contact folks and institutions associated with the project. She is never able to find Sun Tunnels and only locates Spiral Jetta and Double Negative after a lot of driving around lost.
Hogan begins to question whether the effects of the art she set out to see can possibly be worth the difficulty and cost of achieving and viewing them. As she drives through the often majestic West looking for these pieces, she often encounters landscapes that wow her more than the art she set out to see. Most of the land art visited was designed to, in the words of the critic Michael Kimmelman, provide "heightened perception"(108). The author wonders whether such "'heightened perception' was the natural state of being for those who live in the West,"(108) rendering the works unnecessary.
De Maria's Lightning Fields is the first piece that elevates her perception. The work is set on a piece of land a mile long by a kilometer wide. Within that space, De Marie place four hundred identical steel poles at regular intervals. The poles are set at varying depths in the earth so that their skyward tips all meet on an imaginary plane.
Visitors to the field are driven out to the sight by an assistant of De Maria's and must stay overnight in a fairly rustic house. While the work may have been designed to speak it's piece during lightning storms, Hogan is struck with it even though she visits during a twenty-four period of temperate weather. She finds it especially striking at sunset and sunrise when the poles gradually but suddenly appear and disappear as the light strikes or leaves them, casting an intriguing and entrancing skein of shadows on the land. At one point, she experiences a moment where "the atmosphere itself, the air and the light, becomes so powerfulthat one can't experience anything else"(130).
Finally, Hogan finds pleasure and solace in the methodical and basic installations of
Donald Judd in Marfa, Texas. Judd was not a landscape artist per se; he came to fame as a sculptor and founding father of minimalism, an art movement that made a religion out of context. Howver, like Land Art, Minimalism sought not to create objects but atmospheres.
Judd did not make an essential distinction between his objects and the setting in which he placed them but viewed them as integral, equally important. Accordingly, he not only created sculptures but the "museums/spaces" in which they need be seen. The majority of these are sited at a campus of building in and around Marfa, Texas. According to his will, "'works of art which I own at the time of my death as are installed at 101 Spring Street in New York City ...or in Marfa, Texas, will be preserved where they are installed'"(145).
Judd is the ultimate control freak. Beyond trying to create an atmosphere, he is intent on imposing a view, not a metaphorical one, but an actual, through-the-eyes view. His installation 100 untitled works in mill aluminum are 100 boxes, all slightly different, set up in an old artillery shed. Judd redesigned the shed, putting in large windows along the walls so that the boxes are "seen in generous daylight. Also, tours only go through the shed during the late morning, noon and afternoon. While this is owing to a lot of reasons, Hogan suggests that it is another instance of Judd meticulous and obsessive attention to creating a specific experience for viewers.
In sum, with Marfa, Judd wished for viewers to focus on a specific experience without any distractions; everything within the spaces he created is created by him. The critic Michael Kimmelman describes the "impact as hypnotic"(152). According to Kimmelman, in demanding the viewer pay his installations a certain quality of attention, Judd confers on art "a dignity that becomes a moral point. Again quoting Kimmelman in interpreting 100 boxes, Hogan sees the work as "a metaphor for how to deal with each other, which is to say, one at a time and patiently'"(156).
Hogan's record of her journey is an interesting and she has a knack for presenting complex art work and the ideas surrounding it. If you've ever wandered off into the thickets of modern art commentary, the latter is no mean feat. This book truly is an education in a significant swath of contemporary art. Hogan is also a good sketch writer, drawing lively portraits of various places she visits along the way: Arches National Park in Moab, Utah, a dive bar in Montello, Nevada, and sprawl of Juarez, Mexico. She also manages to deftly weave her experience of these places into her thinking on the art she encounters, as when she questions whether anyone could create a work as surrealistic and disorienting as Juarez. By her account, Juarez truly seems a slice of reality that beggars the best products of human imagination.
Her account lacks a bit of narrative drive and not for a lack of building blocks. For instance, at the end of the book, we discover that prior to her journey she tended to believe in an art-for-art's sake aesthetic. The art she encountered on her trip forced her to see how art could alter the world. In particular, The Lightning Fields "drove [her] to attentiveness and continues to give [her] a stage and the mechanism to fully experience my surroundings"(168). This seems like a significant shift. Yet, this shift in them is only mentioned at the end of the book and she never actually spells out what this shift entails in her everyday life. Still, it is interesting and enough is there to imagine how it might affect a person.
What's most disappointing is that Hogan never explores whether she discovered the pleasures and benefits of being alone. This was one of the central goals of her trip and she simply fails to address it at the end of the book. I've long been interested in the art covered in this book. However, I'm even more interested in the challenges, practices and benefits of solitude and solitary existence. This seems to me our present cultures great, untalked about fear. Hogan's raising it and then ignoring it disappointed me greatly. Perhaps, a lot of this is between the lines.
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