Land/Art New Mexico
William L. Fox
This September I was in Albuquerque to give several talks as part of the six-month-long celebration of art & environment in New Mexico. More than two dozen venues, ranging from the small but exquisite The Land Gallery to the cavernous SITE Santa Fe, collaborated to “explore relationships of land, art, and community through exhibitions, site-specific art works, lectures, and a culminating book.” The idea was both to shed light on how land art “seeks to address our changing relationship to nature, and to offer a new or previously unconsidered understanding of the place in which we live”--but also to highlight New Mexico’s role in the history of the art form’s development. Walter De Maria built The Lightning Field in the state in the 1970s, approximately the time when Charles Ross began constructing his Star Axis outside Santa Fe. Bill Gilbert founded the Land Arts of the American West program at the University of New Mexico in 2000, and local artists such as Basia Ireland have long been fusing art & environment in their work. It’s no accident that Lucy Lippard, one of the most important writers about the movement and a CA+E Advisor, moved to New Mexico years ago.
I was able to visit only a few of the festival sites, but a standout for me was a multi-venue installation by composer Steve Peters. Steve--who used to live in Albuquerque but moved to Seattle several years ago--has spent years collecting ambient sounds from around New Mexico, including at “THE LAND/an art site,” the property owned by the gallery of the same name. Walking the property, you find 24 small granite benches scattered in strategic locations, one for each hour of the day and inscribed with a description of the sounds recorded there.
Those recordings, among others from around the state, were then electronically altered and layered with verbal descriptions by ten friends, who took him to places around the state with which they had a deep and personal connection. The Very Rich Hours is a seventy-minute, eight-layer track loop that plays a quiet reverence over a half-dozen benches in the severe and serene Old San Ysdiro adobe church of Coralles just outside Albuquerque. The project was a strong realization of what animates Land Art: the performance of place successfully transformed and transmitted as metaphor into a setting where one can re-experience it.
Next: Land Arts of the American West: Wendover, Utah
This September I was in Albuquerque to give several talks as part of the six-month-long celebration of art & environment in New Mexico. More than two dozen venues, ranging from the small but exquisite The Land Gallery to the cavernous SITE Santa Fe, collaborated to “explore relationships of land, art, and community through exhibitions, site-specific art works, lectures, and a culminating book.” The idea was both to shed light on how land art “seeks to address our changing relationship to nature, and to offer a new or previously unconsidered understanding of the place in which we live”--but also to highlight New Mexico’s role in the history of the art form’s development. Walter De Maria built The Lightning Field in the state in the 1970s, approximately the time when Charles Ross began constructing his Star Axis outside Santa Fe. Bill Gilbert founded the Land Arts of the American West program at the University of New Mexico in 2000, and local artists such as Basia Ireland have long been fusing art & environment in their work. It’s no accident that Lucy Lippard, one of the most important writers about the movement and a CA+E Advisor, moved to New Mexico years ago.
I was able to visit only a few of the festival sites, but a standout for me was a multi-venue installation by composer Steve Peters. Steve--who used to live in Albuquerque but moved to Seattle several years ago--has spent years collecting ambient sounds from around New Mexico, including at “THE LAND/an art site,” the property owned by the gallery of the same name. Walking the property, you find 24 small granite benches scattered in strategic locations, one for each hour of the day and inscribed with a description of the sounds recorded there.
Those recordings, among others from around the state, were then electronically altered and layered with verbal descriptions by ten friends, who took him to places around the state with which they had a deep and personal connection. The Very Rich Hours is a seventy-minute, eight-layer track loop that plays a quiet reverence over a half-dozen benches in the severe and serene Old San Ysdiro adobe church of Coralles just outside Albuquerque. The project was a strong realization of what animates Land Art: the performance of place successfully transformed and transmitted as metaphor into a setting where one can re-experience it.
Next: Land Arts of the American West: Wendover, Utah
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