Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West (Culture Trails) by Erin Hogan

Author:Erin Hogan [Hogan, Erin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2008-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

The view from the lips of Double Negative is stunning. Sky eclipses the land; there’s nothing above you but color, no mountaintops or trees to break up the sense of sheer space. Across the mesa the land appears flat, undifferentiated, and endless. Distant hills bound the view, hazy, slow, and solid. The isolation is tempered by the promise of the green valley below, which sets off the dun color of everything else and evokes associations with civilization, agriculture, fecundity, and mastery.

Double Negative works by accentuating the surrounding positives of land and, oddly, sky, which the void makes palpable as its own volume, turning this dimensionless element of air and light into something as three-dimensional as the land it meets. Standing at the top of Double Negative, even before entering it, I understood exactly what Heizer had meant when he said, “I think size is the most unused quotient in the sculptor’s repertoire because it requires lots of commitment and time. To me it’s the best tool. With size you get space and atmosphere: atmosphere becomes volume. You stand in the shape, in the zone” (Kimmelman, Masterpiece, 204–5).

If, as I claimed in the first chapter, Spiral Jetty works as both a perfect form in isolation and as a personal, durational experience—proving Michael Fried’s ideas about presence both right and wrong at the same time—Double Negative functions mostly as the latter. It requires the viewer to make sense of it (“You stand in the shape, in the zone”); without a viewer it mimics nature, the same process of subtraction that shaped the landscape around Moab, almost too closely to be art. Here it wasn’t Fried’s theory that echoed in my head. Instead, I was struck by what might seem a strange parallel: Double Negative and New York school painting.

Heizer was of the generation of artists who turned their backs on the New York gallery scene in the 1960s, when abstract expressionism and pop art had run their courses, ceding way to minimalism and conceptual art. Like fellow land artists Robert Smithson and Walter De Maria, from whom the Nevadan has otherwise worked hard to distance himself, Heizer found this insular world too limiting and too small for his grand visions. It made sense, given his background, that Heizer would exile himself quite happily to the land of his mining ancestors. This is not to say, though, that Heizer’s work—or the work of “land artists” in general—represents the great break often ascribed to it. It participates directly in the urge to sublimity and its relation to size and scale, an engagement that is also evident in much of the work of the abstract expressionists. I sweated over Double Negative, asking of it the same questions that I had asked of the paintings of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman.

The American sublime has paradoxically resided in both the East and the West—I’m thinking here of the work of the Hudson River School and Albert Bierstadt and Ansel Adams, the granddaddies of the American

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