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I.
El viernes 29 de mayo de 2015, al final del recorrido de media hora en autom�vil
desde la sede de la Fundaci�n Dia Art en Quemado, Nuevo M�xico, hasta The Lightning
Field de Walter De Maria , mi hermana, una arque�loga, pregunta a nuestro conductor
sobre los sitios Pueblo en el �rea. Hace una mueca de dolor cuando nos muestra
tiestos de cer�mica en blanco y negro que ha arrancado del paisaje des�rtico, con
poca consideraci�n por las exquisiteces de la excavaci�n. Parece apropiado discutir
la �tica del desplazamiento y la conservaci�n cuando, hacia las tres de la tarde,
llegamos a la peque�a caba�a al borde del movimiento de tierras de De Maria en
1977, una pieza que debe experimentarse en aislamiento geogr�fico durante un
per�odo prolongado. duraci�n.
Unos a�os antes Smithson viaj� al Great Salt Lake, donde crear�a Spiral Jetty, tom�
una serie de fotograf�as de sitios sin sabor en su ciudad natal de Passaic, Nueva
Jersey - puentes, tuber�as de agua, cajas de arena - sitios que fueron simulacros
en su ubicuidad y homogeneidad. �l design� estos lugares prosaicos en el paisaje
suburbano como "monumentos". "En lugar de hacernos recordar el pasado como los
viejos monumentos", escribi� m�s tarde, "los nuevos monumentos parecen hacernos
olvidar el futuro". Los monumentos de hoy, cincuenta a�os despu�s, tr�iganos el
futuro, ya que lo comprometen. Es decir, los monumentos de 2018 son los cables de
fibra �ptica que conducen los flujos financieros y los impenetrables centros de
datos de Google metidos en los mismos suburbios anodinos: las cosas obstinadas que
nos permiten mantener las narrativas de inmaterialidad y las nubes y en tiempo
real.
Nuestros monumentos, como el de Smithson, son funcionalmente invisibles; pero
nuestra ayuda a abstraer las realidades contundentes de la pobreza, el trabajo y la
ruina ecol�gica. Mi hermana y yo hemos recurrido a los gestos de movimiento de
tierras para localizar tales abstracciones, para buscar alg�n tipo de ant�doto
contra las ofuscaciones ambientales de nuestros monumentos. Por supuesto, las
implicaciones de The Lightning Field , como cualquier obra de arte orientada
fenomenol�gicamente, han cambiado con el tiempo. De Maria no podr�a haber
anticipado las formas en que la tecnolog�a dar�a forma a la percepci�n y la
duraci�n misma. As� que aqu� estamos, sin tecnolog�a, obligados a enfrentar lo que
Smithson llamar�a nuestra "disoluci�n f�sica" entr�pica para las 24 horas
prescritas por De Mar�a.
No hay rayos
Dormimos durante tres horas antes de precipitarnos al fr�o para el amanecer. El sol
de cresta satura los colores de la cubierta del suelo; los postes irradian como
centinelas de otro planeta, sus superficies se mueven con el cielo cambiante.
Quiero estar dentro de la cuadr�cula y fuera de ella de inmediato, para aprovechar
algo de la energ�a all� reunida, para observar c�mo el sistema se materializa y
desmaterializa, cohesiona y desensambla de un objeto a una serie de objetos. Por
supuesto, The Lightning Fieldno se trata de un rayo, o de anticipar una actuaci�n
digna del Pr�spero del cielo. Se trata de aumentar la receptividad del tiempo y el
espacio. Se trata de hacer el ambiente ineluctable. Y sin embargo, en las d�cadas
desde que se erigieron los postes de De Maria, el medio ambiente y sus rabietas
inducidas por la fiebre se han vuelto cada vez m�s dif�ciles de ignorar.
El estado del Spiral Jetty de Robert Smithson en 2017, visible debido a una sequ�a
en curso en el Great Salt Lake. Foto: J. Todd Scott.
The IPCC report puts the onus on such countries as the United States to make, in a
matter of decades, radical changes that include �rapid and deep� emissions cuts and
�sucking already-present carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.� Of course, in the
face of this exigency, the Trump administration has rolled back environmental
protections, advocated for dubious �clean� coal, and announced the US will withdraw
from the Paris Agreement in 2020. What�s more, according to the International
Energy Agency, the US is poised to become the world�s largest oil producer,
exceeding 10 million barrels a day this year. The justi?cation for such regressive
policies, we are told, is not corporate profit but �job creation,� to which the
scandal-trailed Scott Pruitt has completely reoriented the Environmental Protection
Agency.
Under the fraudulent pretext of saving �the American people� more than $300 million
in regulatory costs, Pruitt�s EPA this year began efforts to roll back the Obama-
era Clean Power Plan, which the agency admitted would have saved the lives of up to
4,500 Americans each year by 2030. Pruitt has suspended the Waters of the United
States rule, which kept carcinogens and pollutants out of American rivers and
streams. (Even looking through the egregiously myopic lens of cost burdens, these
acts of ecological vandalism are regressive. The EPA, in 1997, released a cost-
benefit analysis of the Clean Air Act and estimated its total monetized health
benefits from 1970 to 1990 at $22.2 trillion.)
Donald Trump announces that the United States will withdraw from the Paris
Agreement on climate change. 2017.
Pruitt has not conceded the reality of climate change, even asking once whether
global warming �necessarily is a bad thing.� Yet even we who acknowledge the
realities of the crisis aren�t exempt from holding climate change data at arm�s
length. Our own cost-benefit analyses can�t always register the ramifications of
our quotidian decisions, and the magnitude of the issue makes it abstract. More
cynically, our resistance to the bigger picture might boil down to the Stanford
marshmallow experiment, and our aptitude for delayed gratification � and
separately, worse, our biological drive to protect our young � is just shoddy. It�s
a problem of scale, and of narrative: we can�t see the world in a grain of sand,
and vice versa.
In what ways, given this context, must we reframe our understanding of earthworks �
propositions that hinge on our relationship to the environment, to institutions,
and to ourselves? The most famous earthworks � The Lightning Field, Spiral Jetty,
Nancy Holt�s Sun Tunnels (1973�76), and Michael Heizer�s Double Negative (1969�70)
� were produced in the early days of the environmentalist movement. Rachel Carson
published Silent Spring in 1962, which inspired the passage of the Clean Air Act
(1963), the Wilderness Act (1964), the National Environmental Policy Act (1969),
and, in 1970, the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency. When these
earthworks were conceived, federal policy was only beginning to grapple with the
effects of human industry on ecology. In the five decades since, the world
population has more than doubled and the optimism that accompanied the formation of
the EPA (by a Republican administration!) has been corrupted by private interest.
Climate change is transforming land art; that much is already clear. But climate
change also necessitates another, critical transformation: one that accounts for
increasingly destructive temperament of our government, assesses land art�s own
colonization of space, and indeed, factors in the carbon each work requires to be
seen.
Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, on Fashion Show Drive in Las Vegas. 2017.
II.
To get to Michael Heizer�s City from almost anywhere, you need to fly into Las
Vegas. Just off the Strip, is one of the city�s tackiest eyesores: a 64-story,
gold-plated hotel advertised as �undeniably Trump.� The US president�s namesake
hotel also boasts an 11,000-square-foot spa and outdoor roof deck pools with
private air conditioned cabanas. Given such tone-deaf-to-the-desert excesses, it is
hardly surprising that one of Trump�s early acts as president was to order Ryan
Zinke, the interior secretary, to review the size of 27 national monuments, with an
eye toward opening protected land up to development and drilling. Among them is
Basin and Range, a 704,000-acre area two hours north of Las Vegas, which the Nevada
senator Harry Reid encouraged Barack Obama to landmark in 2015. So far Zinke has
not reclassified Basin and Range, but any change in the land�s status may
reinvigorate a botched government plan to build a railroad that would carry nuclear
waste to a proposed repository within Yucca Mountain, near the border with
California. The track would run through several Native American rock art sites and
plow directly through the land surrounding Michael Heizer�s opus City � a project
he started in 1972 and won�t complete until May 2020.
Heizer�s mile and a half-long installation in the rural desert of Lincoln County,
Nevada, comprises five complexes inspired by Native American mound-building and
pre-Columbian ritual cities like Teotihuacan. Like much of Heizer�s work, City is
an exercise in displacement � a mining project, wherein native sediment is mixed
with cement to form positive volumes from the negative ones the artist excavated.
Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, raved to the
New Yorker about Heizer�s work: �Mike started the idea that you can go out in this
landscape and make work that is sublime. There is nothing more powerful, romantic,
and American than these gestures that in Mike�s case have taken his whole life.�
Sublime and romantic it may be � we wouldn�t know. We try to visit City, my sister
and I, but it won�t be open to the public until it�s finished. Needless to say it
has generated a cultish status because of its inaccessibility. But I wonder,
especially in light of this work�s entanglement with climate change denying
policies, what good do such sublime, romantic works do in this moment of ecological
precarity? On the one hand, its existence led to the preservation of the
surrounding land. Harry Reid was captivated by the work and inspired to save it.
�It�ll be there for a long time� he told the Los Angeles Times. �It�s going to be
there forever.� It�s a best case scenario: work that engages the environment
inspires real environmental action. On the other hand, denizens of the art world
will now fly to Vegas, perhaps stay overnight in Trump�s hotel, rent cars to brave
the indifferent desert, and expand their appreciation for the environment along
with their carbon footprint. Govan is therefore correct to call Heizer�s project an
American gesture: at its core, it is a project of expansion. Manifest destiny.
Heizer is constructing City from worthless materials � rocks, sand, and concrete �
sourced on site as a bulwark against future social instability. More precious
materials, Heizer points out, are often reused in a time of need. �Incas, Olmecs,
Aztecs,� he told the New Yorker, �their finest works of art were all pillaged,
razed, broken apart, and their gold was melted down.� Heizer�s goal is to produce a
monument that, in material terms, won�t be worth the effort to destroy. In the end,
the work�s pretensions to eternity are more than simply anti-social; they undermine
the artist�s stated ecological persuasions.
City finds itself in a tough spot, conceived in the high noon of land art and
arriving under the moon of fake news. But the more I think about it � and despite
my own desire for such sublime experiences, despite my admiration for Heizer�s
cool, monolithic geometries � the more tempted I am to compare his project to
Trump�s air conditioned, mountain-view cabanas. Each is a luxury seat from which to
ignore the earth�s imminent shortage of H2(EAU), which happens to be the name of
Trump�s poolside restaurant in the desert.
The Hoover Dam at Lake Mead, Las Vegas's principal water source, which reached its
lowest level ever recorded in 2015.
III.
My sister and I fly in late to Las Vegas, and we can only find a room at a smoky
circus of a hotel, flanked by rooms of raucous frat boys. In the morning, we rent a
Prius and start the hour-and-a-half drive to Double Negative, the void Heizer
excised from a remote mesa in 1969. We make a detour to pass through the Valley of
Fire State Park in the Mojave Desert, its red Aztec sandstone interleaved with gray
and tan limestone. We pull over and climb on the undulating, lava-like formations
from the Mesozoic era; we see petrified trees and Anasazi petroglyphs. As we leave
the desert, our cell reception becomes blinkered, and Google Maps begins to
function as though we were trying to navigate a single pixel.
We find what we think is the unnamed road we are supposed to turn onto and cruise
up the Mormon mesa where the road degenerates into kindling-dry terrain. The low
undercarriage of our Prius is suddenly a problem � the wiry sage brush covering the
ground is known for erupting in flames when cars drive over it. I get out of the
car and help my sister inch through the brush to a narrow, navigable path that hugs
a scalloped cliff overlooking the muddy Virgin River; we spot a car that has
careened over the edge and speculate about the circumstances of the accident.
Unsure of our coordinates, marginally terrified, we approach a man sitting in a
lawn chair not far from the ledge. He could be a Duane Hanson sculpture. He has
enclosed himself within a border of small rocks and has a sign that reads �Welcome
Polish Negative.� Relieved to know we are close, we stop, curious. Our guy had
recently purchased the land he was occupying and had dedicated himself to this
absurdist gambit; he recalled when Heizer came out to the desert with dynamite and
tractors and decided he would make a comparable gesture, sans sweat. He is clearly
ready to take the piss out of us, traveling so far to see, by his estimation,
literally nothing. He never reveals whether he is Polish or not, but he is still
there, alone, when we leave.
I won�t say that Double Negative isn�t nothing. When we find it, we spend an hour
in the dusty heat, walking throat-dry through the two box-like troughs, each 50
feet deep and 30 feet wide, that Heizer carved to intersect a chasm. They face each
other, so that the interior spaces are aligned along a single axis that extends
1,500 feet. I appreciate the semantic game of the work � negative space becomes
doubled where the gestalt of the excised shape overlaps the naturally occurring
cleft of the mesa � and I think about the Sisyphean task of its facture: Heizer
describes the work as a 240,000-ton displacement. I understand that it is best
viewed from the air. While Double Negative�s geometric cuts were originally clean,
the shape has eroded in the decades since it was created. Already in 1976, critic
and curator Lawrence Alloway wrote that �the sides are taking on the rounded edge
and the natural collapse-curves of the sides of the mesa. In fact there has been a
rockfall in one of the cuts recently.� This trend has only accelerated. We are
hesitant to enter the trenches for fear of disturbing them. At first, Heizer toed
the entropy party line; he intended the piece to submit to time and erosion. �Say
the work lasts for ten minutes,� he said in 1969, �or even six months, which isn�t
really that long, it still satisfies the basic requirements of fact.� But he has
since reversed course, hoping to find money to maintain it in perpetuity, even as
the climate shifts.
Los administradores de las obras de Smithson tienen una tarea inc�moda: Spiral
Jettyse supone que es indeterminado y no est� fijado, que responde a la evoluci�n
natural del medio ambiente, un punto de sequ�a que fue inmediatamente afectado por
la industria. Famoso, la espiral se construy� cuando el nivel del agua del lago era
inusualmente bajo. Cuando el agua subi� dos a�os m�s tarde, la bobina de roca
sigui� el camino de la Atl�ntida, y el trabajo a�n estaba bajo el agua cuando Dia
comenz� el proceso de adquisici�n. Pero las sequ�as ocasionaron que el lago
retrocediera y, en 2002, la espiral resurgi� incrustada con cristales blancos de
sal. Hoy, la fundaci�n colabora con dos organizaciones en Utah, el Instituto Great
Salt Lake en Westminster College y el Museo de Bellas Artes de Utah en la
Universidad de Utah, para defender y proteger el sitio siguiendo un curso que se
alinea con la intenci�n original del artista.
Spiral Jetty de Robert Smithson en 2012, despu�s de que los microbios en el lago
convirtieran el agua en roja. Cortes�a del Great Salt Lake Institute, Westminster
College, Salt Lake City, Utah.
Smithson entendi� que "la ciencia pura, al igual que el arte puro, tiende a ver la
abstracci�n como independiente de la naturaleza, no hay explicaci�n para el cambio
o la temporalidad del mundo mundano. La abstracci�n gobierna en un vac�o,
pretendiendo ser libre de tiempo. "La premisa misma de Spiral Jetty es revelar el
clima cambiante. La sequ�a da vida a la espiral, del mismo modo que es
potencialmente la mayor amenaza del trabajo y del p�blico.
Las formas de Purifoy rechazan m�s bien el orden, la jerarqu�a y los marcos
estructurales, y en su lugar revelan la inequidad que se hace visible a medida que
diferentes materiales est�n sujetos a las mismas condiciones implacables. Un
neum�tico de cuatro pesta�as, un tabl�n en una fachada se pudre, un armaz�n de cama
se oxida mientras que otro mantiene su brillo de bronce. Como Huey Copeland
escribi� recientemente, "la entrop�a de Purifoy es aquella en la que tales finales
son puntos de partida en proliferaci�n: el levantamiento racial, la emergencia
social, el desastre continuo de la conquista y civilizaci�n occidental son
cataclismos terminales que siempre est�n llegando". la abstracci�n de la entrop�a,
el trabajo de Purifoy incita a los visitantes a observar que sus efectos est�n
localizados. Su trabajo pone de relieve las formas en que la decadencia y la
transformaci�n social, econ�mica y ambiental ocurren de maneras espec�ficas y
variadas.
En su funci�n de 1980 para Artforum, Walter De Maria escribi� que "el aislamiento
es la esencia del Land Art". Baste decir que ahora es insostenible concebir el
g�nero de esa manera. Los movimientos de tierra son inseparables de las redes e
infraestructuras que los protegen y mantienen, que los hacen visibles. Dependen de
los recursos de quienes se comprometen a verlos. Conf�an en los pasajes a�reos, el
alquiler de autom�viles y el aire acondicionado, es decir, en los combustibles
f�siles, en un momento en que un boleto internacional de ida y vuelta hace que el
�rtico pierda tres metros cuadrados de hielo. Las peregrinaciones a las obras de la
tierra implican necesariamente un elemento de azar, una apuesta de tiempo e
inversi�n. �Vale la pena el viaje a Quemado si los rayos no llegan, a Mormon Mesa
si no podemos encontrar la carretera sin marcar, a Rozel Point si el malec�n est�
sumergido? La b�squeda de las obras es tanto el punto como el trabajo mismo. Las
direcciones enigm�ticas, el rechazo de la tecnolog�a, el artemisa: estas obras
existen como constelaciones de contingencia, como una experiencia molesta. La tarea
ahora es reconsiderar la escala de este valor.