art pilgrimage land art
As I write this, I have the uneasy sense of doing 220 feet apart on a grid measuring a mile by a landscape that looks like Egypt after the Seven
wrong; not so much biting the hand that feeds kilometre. Most exacting of all, the rods are set Plagues. You see a nick cut into the the mesa
me as of biting it off. It’s the traveller’s so that their apexes form a uniform plane level wall, with a corresponding nick across a valley.
conundrum. You find an empty beach, you fly to within a twenty-fifth of an inch. Two minus-marks, a double negative –
home, you write about it. The next time you go, Or that, at least, is the story told by the a throwaway gesture, a little pun that required
it’s covered in endless variants of you. The locals resident cowboy, a man so perfect for the job Heizer to wrestle earth-moving equipment up
are happy, but who cares? The Romantic (his surname is Weather) that you wonder if he to this dreadful place and spend years gouging
isolation – the thrill of standing silent on a peak can be real. Certainly one part of the Lightning 250,000 tons of rock out of cliffs so old that
in Darien – is gone. Field myth – that it is constantly being struck they crumble as you look at them.
Except in this case it’s worse. Beaches by lightning – is not, Mr Weather having seen Double Negative is no joke, and in more
weren’t made not to be lain on, whereas a bare handful of strikes in the 30 years since ways than two. Looking over its perilous side,
invisibility, unvisitability, is what Land Art is he helped build the work. And this, too, is what I see a dead television set 50 feet down on the
about. When Donald Judd left Manhattan for it is about. rock floor. You don’t come all this way to fly-tip:
the desert in 1979, he didn’t go because gallery You can only visit The Lightning Field via the TV is by way of an intervention, the tribute
space was cheaper in West Texas. He went technology – a 757 to fly you to Albuquerque, of some smart-ass student who has spotted
because no one else did – because people like SUVs to haul you through the mud – and what an apocalyptic note in Heizer’s art. And it’s true.
you and me would have to fly to Marfa via you find when you arrive suggests man’s Heizer is his own Ozymandias, making
El Paso or Austin and drive for hundreds triumph over nature. But as much as any artwork works of pharaonic grandeur for the apparently
of miles on roads paved with dead skunks. I can think of, De Maria’s questions its own dismal pleasure of watching them erode.
If we persisted in coming, we’d be met with a point. To get to it you drive past a vast radar That admission of hubris, too, is part of the
palpable air of unwelcome. (Such at least was station called the Very Large Array (the Land Art sublime .
the case when I went to Marfa a few years ago.) inspiration, incidentally, for Keith Tyson’s recent Which mournful thought strikes you
The Chinati Foundation, Judd’s personal Large Field Array). Its serried white dishes seem with force as you approach the most famous
fiefdom, is housed in an ex-army camp. more than scientific; they seem sculptural. earthwork of all, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty.
Getting in is like laying siege to Fort Bragg. Conversely, you can’t shake the feeling that When he built the 1,500-foot swirl of basalt
And this is all part of the Land Art The Lightning Field’s rods must have an ulterior in 1970, Smithson, inspired rather than
aesthetic. The functional space of purpose; that such profligate exactness cannot hydrologically astute, neglected to note that
Michelangelo’s David (1504) is the room it have been wasted on aesthetics alone. Utah’s Great Salt Lake was 30 feet lower than
stands in at the Accademia. The work forces And all the more so for the world’s usual. Consequently, Spiral Jetty disappeared
you to approach it in a certain way, spatially, biggest artwork: James Turrell’s Roden Crater almost as soon as it was finished, followed
but its remit runs out at the door. Approaching (1977–) project, a half-day’s drive away over by Smithson in an aeroplane crash in 1973.
Judd’s magnificent 100 untitled works in mill the Arizona border. Nothing becomes art like invisibility, and
aluminum starts at whichever Texan airport you Turrell has found a surefire way of Spiral Jetty’s has given it the status of Arthurian
fly into, or maybe at Heathrow. The sense of an keeping visitors away, which is to ban them, legend. (In 1997 Tacita Dean made an audio
American epic – of America – is built into the reasonably, until his work is finished, and then piece about trekking out to the work only to find
work. Seen at MoMA, it would be a different never finish it. He has been sculpting his volcano it gone.) Now it has appeared again, clothed not
thing entirely. for 30-odd years now, and there is no sign of in white samite but salt, Smithson’s orginal
So here was the question that plagued its being anywhere near completion. As with blackness limed by long immersion.
me as I drove through Old Testament New Marfa and The Lightning Field, the sense of The temptation to reach for Biblical
Mexico to Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field geological time – days to get there, decades to metaphor – Smithson redivivus! – is
(1977): should I be going at all? Short of erecting make – adds to the genre’s epic feel. Land Art overwhelming, not least because you take your
a billboard outside the town of Quemado with isn’t just very big, it’s very slow: you have to wait life in your hands getting to Spiral Jetty. You
the words ‘Fuck off’ on it, De Maria could not to see it. In fact – Turrell is 64– you may never drive for hours, illegally, across private land,
have been less welcoming, and the Dia Art see Roden Crater at all, other than (as I did) the rancher wreaking revenge by leaving
Foundation, the work’s guardians, have kept his through a distant Jeep window, shimmering boulders on what passes for a track. My rented
tradition alive. You leave your car in Quemado like Xanadu off a dirt track near Flagstaff. 4x4 eventually grounds itself on one of these
at an office of spartan discomfort and are driven You can at least visit Michael Heizer’s with an expensive sound, and I decide to walk
for an unknown distance in an unstated Double Negative (1969), unlike his City, now the rest of the way.
direction to The Lightning Field’s log-cabin some 35 years in the making and And this is when I see the future; a sign,
guesthouse. You feel you would be blindfolded constitutionally unfinishable. Techie fans have scrawled by a previous visitor, saying ‘Jetty this
if the Constitution allowed it. worked out City’s location from satellite maps way’. When Donald Judd opened Marfa 30
Yet you can’t fault De Maria’s logic. and occasionally fly over it, to be greeted by years ago, he wrote this: ‘Somewhere, just as
Six people can stay at The Lightning Field at any hails of buckshot from a furious artist. It’s almost a platinum-iridium meter guarantees a tape-
one time, and they must do so for 24 hours. 40 years since Heizer finished Double Negative, measure, a strict measure must exist for
This gives them room to understand the though, and his subsequent neglect of the work the art of this time and place.’ He and Smithson
enormity of the undertaking, which is only partly seems close to filicide. saw people like me as an impurity that would
to do with scale. In the face of God’s great To get to it, you drive to the half-horse contaminate Land Art’s great experiment.
imprecision – scrubby flatland ringed with sullen town of Overton, Nevada, and then up the side They made work so big that no one could
mountains – De Maria has imposed his own of a nearby mesa. Once on top, hands clamped overlook it and then hoped that everyone
perfection: 400 stainless steel rods, identically to the wheel, you bump over a roadless would. And that, in the end, was foolish.
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