Land Arts of the American West

In 2000 professor Bill Gilbert, initiated an “interdisciplinary field program” at the University if New Mexico. Land Arts of the American West soon became a collaboration with professor Chris Taylor from Texas Tech University. Each year students involved in this extended course embark on a fifty day-10,000 mile road trip, with the objective of “expanding the definition of art through direct experience with the full range of human interventions in the landscape, from pre-contact indigenous to contemporary.” The group visits sites such as the Wendover Complex, the Roden Crater (Turell), Grand Canyon, Double Negative (Heizer), Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), Spiral Jetty (Smithson), Chinati Foundation in Marfa TX (Judd), Lightning Field (De Maria), Chaco Canyon and more. The semester is spent traveling and camping with guest scholars, whose expertise range from archeology to critical theory, design, sculpture, art history, and architecture. Students also respond and interact with their environment by making artistic gestures and leaving their own mark on the landscape.

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Chris Taylor is a Harvard-trained architect who teaches architecture at Texas Tech University. In conjunction with the Architecture Workers Combine, he explores the direct and interstitial forces creating landscape with built work in New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and Pennsylvania.

Bill Gilbert holds the Lannan Chair in Land Arts of the American West in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of New Mexico. His art practice explores the dialogue between environment and cultures in the Southwest. He has exhibited his work in the United States, Ecuador, the Czech Republic, Canada, and Japan.

The Cabinet National Library

While designing the 2003 spring issue on "Property", Cabinet Magazine (a non-profit publication on art, sculpture & culture) purchased a 1/2 acre of land on Ebay for a mere $300. The property was a lot from the Sunshine Valley Ranchettes, an unsuccessful suburban development project from the 1960s.

The small New Mexico lot-- situated outside Deming, was subsequently dubbed "Cabinetlandia." Magazine -sized quadrants of the property were sold for one penny to Cabinet readers upon request. Cabinetlandia soon bragged of domains such as Readerlandia, Nepotismia, and Editoria, and other sectors within the greater motherland. Most importantly, however, Cabinetlandia became home to "The Cabinet National Library."

The Cabinet National Library is fittingly housed in a filing cabinet lodged within a cement wall. The top drawer of the library holds a card catalog, guestbook, and local service information. The middle drawer contains back issues of the magazine (open for public view, of course) and the bottom drawer serves as a snack bar.

If you plan to visit Cabinetlandia it is recommended that you contact Cabinet's editors beforehand, so that you can obtain recent issues of the publication for restocking the archive.

From Deming heading EAST:

- Take Route 549 East from Deming.
- Approx. 10 miles outside Deming, turn LEFT onto Lewis Flats Road (Luna County B041).
- Pass dairy farm and 3 sets of gates. Take the overpass over Highway 10.
- At the end of the overpass, turn immediately RIGHT on first DIRT road (parallel to Hwy 10).
- When you reach the end of that road turn RIGHT (toward Hwy 10).
- Take your first LEFT (parallel to Hwy 10).
- When you reach the end of that road turn RIGHT (toward Hwy 10).
- Turn to the RIGHT on the THIRD dirt road.
- About 200 yards down the road, the Cabinet postbox and Library should be on your LEFT

From Las Cruces heading WEST:

- Take Hwy 10 West from Las Cruces.
- Exit Route 549 West toward Deming.
- Approx. 10 miles outside Deming, turn RIGHT onto Lewis Flats Road (Luna County B041).
- Pass dairy farm and 3 sets of gates. Take the overpass over Highway 10.
- At the end of the overpass, turn immediately RIGHT on first DIRT road (parallel to Hwy 10).
- When you reach the end of that road turn RIGHT (toward Hwy 10).
- Take your first LEFT (parallel to Hwy 10).
- When you reach the end of that road turn RIGHT (toward Hwy 10).
- Turn to the RIGHT on the THIRD dirt road.
- About 200 yards down the road, the Cabinet postbox and Library should be on your LEFT.

Michael Heizer, City

Tom Vanderbilt's article Desert of Dreams posted on Oct.3 by Chelsea reminded me of Michael Heizer's current project located somewhere near Yucca Mountain, Nevada. The project consists of several massive structures built of stone, steel, and earth. Some of the structures are 80 feet high and a quarter mile long. Heizer began construction on City in 1970 and is expected to finish by 2010. Currently the site is closed to visitors.



Heizer's structures imitate the cold war structures Tom Vanderbilt mentions in his article Desert of dreams. The large, blank facades of earth reinforced with sterile concrete indicate a defensive function, similar to a bomb shelter. In the second image, the arangement of narrow spaces between huge concrete wedges resemble the slots in castle walls from which archers could fire while being protected, or shields designed to deflect a blast.

City was begun in the early seventies as an attempt to distil everything that had come before it into a single work of art. It is meant as a sort of relic to convey the accomplishments and feelings of humanity to later generations. Int his way the structure is defensive. It is designed to defend itself against the attack of time and possible warfare.

Relating to the defensive posture of City, I would also like to comment on Donald Judd's Marfa, Texas. Marfa is a small town near the Mexican border in west Texas. Beginning in the seventies Donald Judd, a well known sculptor, began to purchase buildings in Marfa including an old bank and a decomissioned air force base. Judd eventually bought most of the town turning the buildings into galleries for like minded artists to install their work permanently without interference. Dan Flavin, David Rabinowitch, and John Chamberlain are among the artists featured in Marfa.

Judd has since died but Marfa remains... exactly as he left it. Judd left New York in search of a place where he could place art works that he deemed valid permanently on view. Judd was a strict minimalist. He is best known for making variations on a box in various materials. As he watched tastes change and art that he considered bad gain popularity he resolved to create "stronghold" where pure minimalism could live on. When visiting Marfa one gets the sense that tha artwork is quietly waiting to be reborn, weathering the storm until a time when people realize their mistake in turning away from the purity of Judd's boxes. Though Marfa has none of the mega-structures of City or any accoutrments of a millitary installation (even the air force base has glass walls where concrete used to be) the protectionist ideology is still felt.

Sighting: Unidentified Aerial Objects

Thus far, Michel and I have witnessed two bizarre aerial objects on this very trip. Oddly enough, both instances occurred in remote locations at major earthworks, i.e. Smithson's Spiral Jetty and Heizer's Double Negative. We captured this photograph on the evening of the 17th.


If you look closely, you can just make out the profile of Spiral Jetty. We first noticed a vertical orange streak in the sky, as if an object with a straight trajectory was leaving a trail of fire in its wake. For several minutes we analyzed what we were seeing, which seemed unique in comparison to the hazy trails left by airplanes. These condensation trails (contrails) appeared to be parallel to the landscape, while this fiery streak was purely vertical. We finally snapped this photograph (above) as the burning streak dimmed, dissipating in a smoky haze.

("Faux" Photographic Recreation of Said Object)

Even more impressive were the strange lights we watched in the distance from Double Negative. As the sun went down we watched a fantastic array of shooting stars and meteors (evidently the area was experiencing a shower that evening). The lights of a few planes blinked in the distance. Then, around 9:00pm, just above the horizon, two tiny white lights (about the same scale as airplanes at that distance) appeared at equal distances apart and moved rapidly toward one another from the east and the west. Just before crossing one another due north, they both suddenly stopped and hovered. Simultaneously they lit up about three times larger than their initial size, glowing a fierce white in the center with a green and red aura on the fringes. They remained in this state for about a minute, then once again dimmed to their original state and retreated to their point of origin. They simultaneously disappeared.

Two explanations for our experiences exist, they don't help with plausibility. The nearest town to Spiral Jetty, Corinne UT is home to a rocket-motor test facility. The Thiokol Promontory Complex, a facility that builds shuttles for NASA, is also situated in Ogden, UT. As for anomalous aerial objects observed at Double Negative, one has to wonder if we witnessed some sort of aerial test performed on the infamous Nellis Air Force Complex, located about fifty miles from us. Nellis is also home to the rumored facility Area 51.

Nomad Space (A Thousand Plateaus)

Deluze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus) suggest that spaces of great expanse such as the desert, the arctic, and the high sea elicit an overwhelming sensation of detachment on the part of the viewer. It is a natural response to orient oneself by taking in, gauging and analyzing all aspects of a spatial encounter. To grapple with the endlessness of direction one must distinguish relationships between the sand, the bushes, the rushing of the wind and the location of rock. We struggle to gain our bearings in the incomprehensible void. Under these conditions one becomes acutely aware of elements such as the wind, and instinct takes over. As we "listen to direction," or these multiple voices ("poly-vocality") of space, we become aware of the fact that in realty we do not occupy a mere place within a region; rather, we "exist through the whole region." In effect we become nomadic.

"I, as nomad--live and move on the steppe. I exist through the whole region, here/there in all of it, not just in art of it. Localization undeniably exists: at any given moment. I am somewhere but drifting nowhere (as non-nomads who have never lived on the desert or steppe, or been at sea, doubtless fear). But my being somewhere is not restricted to being in a single locality: The ship is always moving on, the caravan continues, the dog team careens over the ice. I am distended everywhere within the region: I am potentially at any place within it. The region is the place that I am in. Thus the absolute has become the local, rather than the reverse. For place itself is everywhere- everywhere in, indeed as, the region." (A Thousand Plateaus, 494)

Mirror Displacement (Smithson)

Below is an image of broken glass laying on the desert floor. This particular bit of glass is located next to Morman Mesa Road as it leads up to Michael Heizer's Double Negative. And, as I drove past this glass I thought it was a mirror because it reflected the sky very well. My mind was immediately drawn back to the reflections in the saline crystals at the Spiral Jetty and to Robert Smithson in general. In his work Yucatan Mirror Displacements, Smithson lays small pieces of mirror in various places, covered and uncovered, throughout South America. By laying a mirror into the sand Smithson brings a little bit of sky down to earth, compressing the distance between.
But, the thing that strikes me most about this spider web of broken glass in the desert is the arbitrary placement beside a dirt road leading to nowhere. In fact, broken shards of glass and mirror littler the sides of the desolate desert road until it becomes a nearly impassible trail guarded by sharp rocks. Why do people place all of these reflective surfaces in this endless flat landscape? I would like to suggest one thought. When faced with the seemingly interminable void, the human instinct is to define it. One way to define a space is to define ones location within it, relative to it. A mirror, providing a reflection of oneself, allows the viewer to envision him/herself as part of that infinite distance and to break down the terrifying vastness of space.

Las Vegas

Speaking of Double Negative, Michel and Chelsea are doubly negative about Las Vegas.