Books about Earthworks from Amazon.com

Erin Hogan hit the road in her Volkswagen Jetta and headed west from Chicago in search of the monuments of American land art: a salty coil of rocks, four hundred stainless-steel poles, a gash in a mesa, four concrete tubes, and military sheds filled with cubes. Her journey took her through the states of Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. It also took her through the states of anxiety, drunkenness, disorientation, and heat exhaustion. Spiral Jetta is a chronicle of this journey.
            A lapsed art historian and devoted urbanite, Hogan initially sought firsthand experience of the monumental earthworks of the 1970s and the 1980s—Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, James Turrell’s Roden Crater, Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, and the contemporary art mecca of Marfa, Texas. Armed with spotty directions, no compass, and less-than-desert-appropriate clothing, she found most of what she was looking for and then some. Her encounters with these artworks are recorded here, personal observations lightly draped in art history and theory. But for Hogan this trip was also the most extended time she had spent alone, and her 3,000-mile circuit through the west became an experiment in solitude, with mixed results.
            Spiral Jetta offers a view of a critical moment of twentieth-century American art. It also offers a view of the American landscape, seen through the windshield of a car streaming through the empty highways of the American West, piloted by a woman who had no real idea where she was going.

Walter De Maria's Lightning Field (1977) is one of the 20th century's most significant works of art. Situated in a remote area of desert in southwestern New Mexico, it comprises 400 polished, stainless-steel poles (spaced 220 feet apart) installed in a grid measuring one mile by one kilometer. A sculpture to be explored on foot, The Lightning Field is intended to be experienced over an extended period of time.  

 

Critic Kenneth Baker visited The Lightning Field numerous times over the course of the past 30 years in order to write this text. Inspired and challenged by this remarkable artwork, Baker speculates on the course of our contemporary human condition. But, rather than building on ideas in narrative sequence, he deploys quotation to effect multiple perspectives and points of view. Baker's citations and elegantly crafted prose are arrayed––in a metaphorical parallel to De Maria's choreographing of the vast landscape of the American Southwest––to create a compelling text.