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Artifact reason: beyond image-based research
University of Texas, USA <c_dog@mail.utexas.edu> |
volume 3 contents
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Introduction: the primacy of experience |
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A dozen times in the summer of 1974, I camped beside a millpond deep in the woods of Connecticut. I can still recall the sense of awe and excitement of coming upon this hidden spot and realizing that human hands had created it perhaps a hundred years before. Giant oaks stood on either side of a stone dam wide enough, perhaps, to drive a mule and wagon across. There was a gentle rise of land overlooking this half-acre pond, and here my friends and I found a spot so special to us that we did what thirteen-year-olds will do: we carved our names in the beech trees and called the place "The Kingdom."
One Thanksgiving twenty years later, I wandered silently for more than an hour through a subdivision, crossing cul-de-sacs back and forth, looking to find my pond. I was sure I was in the right place, but nothing around me looked the same. The stream was gone, the gentle ravine and the dam were gone. When I was about to give up and accept that this was no longer a place but now only a memory, I found myself oriented in just the right way so that even though the land had been transformed by bulldozers beyond recognition, my body remembered. I reconnected with a place that had died. I knew where I was. I looked across a stretch of pavement and saw immediately adjacent to a two-car garage an old beech tree with "The Kingdom" carved in it. 1 Reasoning with artifacts is fundamentally different than reasoning with static images fixed in time. It is a reasoning that engages the full capacity of the body to both understand and remember. Artifacts, while not always, tend to be situated within a dynamic and evolving world. Our ability to apprehend this condition is directly linked to our movement towards actual experience with the artifacts and their relation to the context that contains them. Human interventions in the landscape 2 are artifacts; manifestations of our actions that produce objects in or affect changes to the land. Artifacts can include everything from a cave painting (pictograph) or drawing pecked in a rock surface (petroglyph) to the construction of a road, building a monument, taking a walk, or leaving a mark in the sand. They include gestures both small and grand, directing our attention from the potsherd and cigarette butt to ancient stone ruins and massive hydroelectric dams. 'Land art' as a term emerges from the art world of the 1960's and 70's. The momentum created by that movement, a movement of artists out of the studio and away from practices of representing the land to working and making their 'mark directly within the environment,' 3 continues today. However, land arts practices have deeper roots in history, and pre-history, 4 and can be used to look beyond the art world into the larger condition of how we as humans occupy and alter the land we inhabit. A unique condition of much art in the land of the American West is that it is seen or directly experienced only by a small number of people. The labor and difficulty of access limits widespread visitation. It is even common for experts in the field of art history and criticism, among others, to write of work they have never visited personally. 5 At the same time these artifacts have been widely influential to a range of artists and designers. A critical examination is needed of the tendencies and modalities of a thinking—research and the production of history—that while about artifacts rarely studies the primary source material, the actual interventions in the landscape over time. The question of restoring 6 an artifact to a specific moment in history, to resemble an image fixed in time, further demonstrates the space between two forms of reasoning, between reasoning with fixed images or artifacts. Analog In May of 1785 the Continental Congress of the United States passed a land ordinance calling for the surveying and auction of public lands to generate revenue. 7 This action also instituted the definition and use of the 'rectangular survey' in contrast to the 'metes-and-bounds' techniques common in the seaboard states. Instead of working relatively from known geographic features, a geometric logic was overlaid on the land as it was surveyed and divided into six-mile square 'townships' each containing 36 one-mile square 'sections'. 8 The trajectory of this action continued throughout the settlement and development of the American West, overlaying an external framework upon a diverse and heterogeneous topography. 9/sup> Opening the space between the map and the territory 10 parallels the space to be explored between the artifact and the image. Vehicle Propelling this examination is Land Arts of the American West, 11 a studio-based, field study program that investigates land arts practices from pre-contact Native American to contemporary Euro-American cultures. Land Arts views place as a continuum across time and cultures, demonstrating the potential of situating questions between disciplines and definitions, between the land, art, and design. We move through the land with a wide view, with the legacy of landscape historian J.B. Jackson, encompassing the full range of human interaction within the physical geography. The trailer park, wilderness, road, garden, shrine, artwork, farm, and industrialization of the land, all fall within the scope of our inquiry. We also examine the space between aspects of our journey. We learn from the fact that Donald Judd surrounded himself with both contemporary sculpture and Navajo rugs; that Chaco Canyon and Roden Crater function as celestial instruments; and that the Very Large Array is a scientific research center with a powerful aesthetic presence on the land. Land Arts is a collaboration between Studio Art at the University of New Mexico and Design at the University of Texas at Austin. Fourteen students and two faculty, spend a semester living and working in the southwestern landscape with guest scholars in disciplines including archeology, art history, architecture, ceramics, criticism, writing, design, and studio art. Occupying the land for weeks at a time, living as a nomadic group and working directly in the environment, students navigate issues of culture, site, community and self. They develop skills of perception and analysis unattainable in a standard classroom setting. Contemporary university education is rife with courses that take place in windowless rooms on campus referring to artifacts in the world beyond. This mode of teaching while valuable and efficient can become a filter for the interpretation of knowledge that is limited by its own efficiency. We bring students into the world rather than the world to the students; the land of the American West is our classroom. Land Arts is an interdisciplinary model of education that hinges on the relation between place and human interventions in the land—artifacts. To explore this dynamic we will look briefly at four works of land art, specific sites, to demonstrate the potential of reasoning with artifacts. The goal of this essay is not to embark on an art historical or archeological presentation, but to use the space between the sites and the overlapping logics of their experience to demonstrate the importance of working directly with artifacts. Chaco Canyon Chaco Canyon marks a distinct shift in the patterns of settlement in the American West with the concentration of resources and population on a scale previously unrealized in the region. The Chaco Phenomena 12 is characterized by the creation, built to coordinate with celestial and astronomical orientations, of 'Great Houses' and a vast network of roads connecting the center of the canyon to outlying settlements. Construction of this concentration began in 850 AD and by 1300 the Anasazi had predominately abandoned the canyon and dispersed to more hospitable terrains (to the north along the San Juan river and to the southeast along the Rio Grande). However, the history of occupation in the area continued to evolve along a multilayered course of fluctuating visibility. By the 1700's hogans, Navajo dwellings, are built in the canyon with materials from the ruins of the 'Great Houses.' In 1877 the U.S. Geological Survey begins formal mapping and recording of archeological remains and in 1888 the first photographs of the canyon are made, revealing evidence of looting and vandalism at many sites. In 1896 Richard Wetherill moves to the canyon to begin site excavations and remains there until his death in 1910. During this time he homesteads parts of the canyon and builds a trading post adjacent to Pueblo Bonito (the largest of the Great Houses). 1896 marks the beginning of large-scale excavations in Chaco Canyon that continue well into the 1940's. 13 The excavations were primarily motivated by the accumulation of artifacts for collections of museums such as the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and the Smithson Institution. During this time thousands of artifacts are removed from the area and to this day remain in remote museum collections. The Federal Antiquities Act of 1906 was enacted to protect artifacts in the U.S. in large part as a reaction to the controversial excavations at Chaco. In 1907 the Chaco Canyon Historic Monument is established in an effort to further preserve and manage the historic resources of the canyon. However, the excavations continue and in the 1920's part of the work involved the restoration and repair of previously 'vandalized' or damaged structures. This effort of reconstruction was greatly expanded in the 1930's under the charge of stabilization. In 1947 Tomasito, the last Navajo resident leaves the canyon. To promote public access as a National Park a visitor center, staff housing, and campgrounds are constructed in 1959. During this transformation, from settlement to a site of open archeological excavations to a public park and monument, more than artifacts were removed from the canyon. A decision was made to present only traces of the Puebloan legacy of the Anasazi in the canyon; therefore Wetherill's homestead, trading post, and the Navajo hogans were all removed. The continued restoration and stabilization efforts have further acted to preserve, and create, an image of Chaco Canyon from a near singular perspective. While a trained eye can begin to discern traces of this history, of the reconstructed masonry concealing the path of artifact hunters for example, much of it has been swept away. The canyon, now a national park and UNESCO site is protected by significant and strong legislative and enforcement efforts, yet the reality is that the majority of its artifacts have long since been removed. What remains continues to be a rich and powerful container of inhabitation, but the editing of the historic record in the canyon, to present one aspect rather than the multilayered reality, sets up a one-dimensional view of that history and represents a movement from artifacts to image. Double Negative In 1969 Michael Heizer began the creation of Double Negative, a work that would expand the definition of contemporary sculpture. On the remote Morman Mesa north of Overton, Nevada he created a sculptural void by displacing 240,000 tons of earth defining a space 30 feet wide by 50 feet deep and 1500 feet from end to end. Bisected by a natural side canyon the void is oriented north south and runs near parallel to the wide expanse of the Virgin Valley below. Heizer speaks about the difference between size and scale; in Double Negative the perception of its size is an element of the experience. Made with the support of Virginia Dwan, images of the sculpture were exhibited in her New York gallery upon its completion. Public knowledge and critique of the work occurred principally through those images and the critiques tended to be quick to identify Double Negative as a masculine display of power rife with environmental insensitivity. It is possible to understand the origination of this critique, guided by images from a gallery wall, without visiting the work. But, to make the trip to Nevada, to experience the actual artifact, is to place your human body in relation to the work and the diversity of its context. On October 1st, 2002, the barren mesa top is swept by a hot wind and after weeks of living, camping, and working on the land students are equipped with new sensibilities to read Double Negative and the state of its surroundings. The piece is no longer the isolated act of one man, but a complex set of relations, forces, and scales. They include the signs of habitation and intervention within the work ranging from the nests of small birds and animals, to beer bottles, shell casings, and an old fire ring. This sculpture that is longer than the Empire State Building is tall also sheltered us from the strong winds and intense afternoon heat. Rather than reading as a monumental intrusion on the land, for this group of students, Double Negative was delicate and downright small in comparison with the vast size of the mesa's edge opening to the Virgin Valley and mountains beyond. This is made particularly clear in comparison to the relative size of other human interactions in the land such as the Hoover Dam, 14 open pit mines, interstate highways, and electrical power systems. The significant erosion of the original excavation is also very revealing. The strength and weakness of the geology of the site are no longer visual clues in a surface; the soft areas have given way, taken over by the forces of wind and rain. Boulders settle and sand drifts swell through the bottom of the cut. The evidence of time marked by the erosion of the last thirty years prompts the question: will this work be legible as a distinct figure in the land in another thirty years? I believe that Double Negative has been made stronger by the erosion that has lead to its further integration and assimilation into the land of its definition. The mark Heizer made in 1969-1970 is significant as a measure of our relation to the land, to the interplay between an initial human gesture and the dynamic forces of geologic time, visible in the unstable shape of the surface of the earth. Earth, after all, is not a static or archival medium. Part of the power of this work is its temporal displacement. To restore the sculpture, now or in the future, to a state were it resembles images from 1970 challenges the legitimacy of its history and represents the formation of a new work. This situation opens a connection between Heizer's work and a body of ideas that other artists of the time were evolving. 15 Spiral Jetty In large part, Robert Smithson was introduced to the American West by his association with Michael Heizer and Virginia Dwan. Smithson's work 16 was shaped by forces of entropy, modes of viewing the extraordinary in the ordinary, and the problematization of the relation between site and non-site—the dichotomy of making work in the land (site) and presenting evidence of that action in the gallery (non-site). North of the Lucin Cutoff an algae turns the shallow waters of the Great Salt Lake an orangey-pink color that appears to be from another world. The expanse of barren rolling hills peppered with basalt, the timeless remnants of oil exploration, ranching, and homesteading, all support this mood. Everything that touches the lake carries the mark of salt—both preservation and decay. In 1970 at Rozel Point Robert Smithson moved 6,650 tons of earth to create the Spiral Jetty into these pink waters of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Shortly after its creation it vanished, submerged by the fluctuating water level of the lake. Remaining hidden for nearly thirty years, the recent drought throughout the west has lowered the level of the lake, enabling the re-emergence of the Spiral Jetty. Visiting land art the journey is often as important as the destination. While we can assess these works in terms limited to their contribution to the discourse of art history, we should also incorporate an understanding that their very presence in the land affords a new experience of a larger context. 17 Aspects specific and internal to the works are understood in relation to perceptions of the larger landscape they occupy. Visiting the Spiral Jetty we experience the image we have seen before, the jetty as whole figure in the distance, but we also experience the bumps of the long dirt road, the crunch of salt under our feet, and the taste of the wind off the lake. The topic of restoration has also risen in regards to the Spiral Jetty, further demonstrating a distinction between the operative logic of images and artifacts. In this case the author of the work, who is no longer living, initiated an action in relation to the dynamic forces of a site. His intent was clearly not static; the work was conceived to evolve over time. What is at stake now is locating the value of the work. If its value rests in the idea, with the intent of the author, then the work should be allowed to remain as an artifact participating in a dynamic process that began over thirty years ago. If the value rests in a fixed moment in time and in the representation of that moment, then the work is bound, as an image, to be preserved in the static form of a final portrait. In this case the movement from artifact to image clearly results in a fundamental loss of content, of stripping the work down to a formal symbol, a shadow of its operative intent. Moonhouse The hike across Cedar Mesa, Utah from Emigrant Trail to the north edge of Snow Flat brings us through low piñon and juniper cover growing from loose red sand. A narrow trail leads through the fragile cryptobiotic crust that attempts to hold the sand in place. Soon we emerge onto a large sandstone formation that marks the edge of a deep canyon. At the rim we see our destination midway up the other side, Moonhouse, a ±1200-year-old settlement built of mud and rock into the steep canyon wall. We pause for a minute to wonder if the seasonal creek at the bottom once flowed year round. After a bit of searching we find the drop in point and begin the slow climb down into the canyon. The trail fades and reappears with the consistency of the footing; narrow rock shelves give way to loose sand and scruffy vegetation. The trail up the other side while still steep is more secure. Rounding the corner at the large stone 'thumbs' we approach a series of structures seamlessly fitted into the canyon wall. Prints left by the hands and feet of the makers, still legible in the surface of the mud, and the remaining pictographs on the rock walls collapse a connection across time. We enter the continuum of human intervention with the land. Moonhouse is an un-restored ruin in an un-disclosed location. Under the flag of protection rangers at the nearby Kane Creek Station do not provide information about access to the site. The difficulty of the journey again is part of the experience. However, this difficulty carries an ethical response that is larger than the challenges of location information or negotiating the steep climb. The fact that the site is open, without maintained trails and 'photo spots,' requires that visitors negotiate for themselves their relation to the site and its history and accept responsibility for its care. Cognitive Dissonance The author and poet William L. Fox studies the deployment of cultural strategies to overcome the cognitive dissonance we suffer in desert regions. 18 His intersection with Land Arts occurs, among other points, within the dry lakebeds (playas) of the Great Basin. Fox maintains that our human cognitive abilities, physiological and psychological, have not evolved to allow humans to easily negotiate isotropic spaces, landscapes that are the same in all directions. Beyond the physical challenges presented by the playas, from intense heat or cold to the lack of shelter or water, as humans we do not have the abilities to perform well in these environments. It is one thing to learn about this idea in the abstract, as an idea communicated in a book or through a lecture, but it is an all-together different matter to experience its implications first hand. Out in the midst of the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, an example was given that it is almost impossible for a human to walk a straight line in such terrain—the pan flat and undifferentiated expanse of the flats. To test the idea I set my sights on the peak of a distant mountaintop and ventured forward attempting to hold as straight a course as possible. Figure 20 clearly demonstrates my inability. While I am using an image to illustrate this concept, the point here is to say that lessons learned directly in the field, with the artifacts of footprints as proof, have a different impact than lessons learned with further distance or dislocation. Land Arts hopes to confirm the idea that if you bring students out into the world instead of the world into the classroom, you can fundamentally change how we learn, create, and view our surroundings. In this context we strive to make deeper and more precise connections within our work and make broader connections outside of ourselves. The work of Land Arts, particularly in relation to the question of contemporary and pre-contact restoration, is an attempt to construct a logic of reasoning directly with artifacts. A logic that acknowledges the fluid, dynamic, qualities of the environment that we continue to participate in shaping. Reasoning with artifacts is fundamentally different than reasoning with static images fixed in time, even if the landscape is at first unrecognizable. Endnotes 1 Peter Forbes, The Great Remembering: further thoughts of land, soul, and society, (San Francisco: The Trust for Public Lands, 2001), pp. 7-8. 2 I use the term 'landscape' here specifically to define and include both the natural condition of the land and our human interaction with that condition. I believe at this point in time it is unproductive to think of land absent of human interaction. Our reach as humans extends from affecting patterns of global climate change to impacting local micro ecosystems around our houses with the introduction of fertilizers and pesticides. Our debris in outer space further marks the limits and expanse of human artifacts on an ever-widening scale. 3 Kastner, Jeffrey, editor, survey by Brian Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, (London: Phaidon Press, 1998). 4 Lippard, Lucy, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory, (New York: New Press; Distributed by Norton, 1995). 5 This is not a generalized critique of art historians or critics, but a comment tied to the specific demands of work situated in the landscape and instances regarding the works in question. 6 Set apart from repair through continued use. The regular re-plastering of contemporary Pueblos is an example of maintenance rather than restoration. 7 Wilford, John Noble, The Mapmakers: the story of the great pioneers in cartography from antiquity to the space age, (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), pp. 184-185. 8 Davis, Ramond E., and Francis S. Foote, Surveying: theory and practice, (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1940), p. 604 9 John Wesley Powell's call to develop a system of mapping and land use system based on watersheds is an example of a logic emerging from particular qualities and configurations of the land. See Paul Cohen, Mapping the West: America's westward expansion 1524-1890, (New York: Rizzoli, 2002), p. 195-197. 10 Reference to Korzybski's dictum “The map is not the territory” from A. Korzybski, Science and sanity, 2nd Edition, (Lancaster, PA: International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Co,, 1941), p. 58. Cited by David Turnbull in Maps are Territories: science is an atlas, (Chicago: Universisty of Chicago Press, 1993 and, Victoria Australia: Deakin University, 1989), p. 3. 11 Program information can be found online at: http://design2.art.utexas.edu/land_arts 12 Cordell, Linda, Archaeology of the Southwest, (San Diego, California: Academic Press, 1997, 2nd Edition), pp. 305-322. 13 A concise chronology can be found on the National Park Service website: http://www.nps.gov/chcu/briefhis.htm 14 Driving from the east you will cross Hoover Dam, an object made of 6,600,000 tons of concrete to contain 28,537,000 acre feet of water. 15 Regardless of the personal and artistic differences that emerged between Heizer and Smithson, I feel it is important to take into account ideas at play in the larger historical moment. 16 For additional information about Smithson see: Reynolds, Ann, Robert Smithson: learning from New Jersey and elsewhere, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003). 17 In fact, at The Lightning Field, a work by Walter di Maria from 1977, the work is an armature to view the natural phenomena of the environment. 18 Fox, William, Playa Works: The Myth of the Empty, (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002). References Abbey, Edward, Desert Solitaire, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988). Chinati Foundation and authors, Art in the Landscape, (Marfa, Texas: The Chinati Foundation, 2000). Cohen, Paul, Mapping the West: America's westward expansion 1524-1890, (New York: Rizzoli, 2002). Cordell, Linda, Archaeology of the Southwest, (San Diego, California: Academic Press, 1997, 2nd Edition). Forbes, Peter, The Great Remembering: further thoughts on land, soul, and society, (San Francisco: The Trust for Public Lands, 2001). Fox, William, Playa Works: The Myth of the Empty, (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002). Jackson, John Brinkerhoff, A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). Kastner, Jeffrey, editor, survey by Brian Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, (London: Phaidon Press, 1998). Lippard, Lucy, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory, (New York: New Press; Distributed by Norton, 1995). Reynolds, Ann, Robert Smithson: learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003). Shepheard, Paul, The Cultivated Wilderness: Or, What is Landscape?, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997). Weschler, Lawrence, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: a Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). |
to cite this journal article: Taylor, C. (2004) Artifact reason: beyond image-based research. Working Papers in Art and Design 3 Retrieved <date> from URL http://sitem.herts.ac.uk/artdes_research/ papers/wpades/ vol3/ctfull.html ISSN 1466-4917 
 All images by Chris Taylor unless noted otherwise. All images ©2002-2003, Land Arts of the American West |
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