Inevitably, those who know, read, or teach her work remark at some point along the way on Lucy Lippard’s mind. It understood the connections between art, popular culture, and the politics of our destruction and survival before most of us did, and has been writing brilliantly about all these things and more for years. It is to New Mexico’s immeasurable gain that she has lived here for the past 22 years and that her concerns continue to embrace our reality. Down Country: The Tano of the Galisteo Basin, 1250-1782 appeared in 2010. It is a large, very thorough, and beautiful exploration of time and place, centered in the area where she lives. Her most recent book, Undermining, a Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West is a non-stop monologue that links our own landscape to others throughout the nation and world, allowing the reader unfettered insight into Lippard’s power of observation, insight, deep sense of history, and commitment to a sustainable future.
The latter title (New York, The New Press, 2014, 200 pp, $21.95) dispenses with the prologues, prefaces and introductions so often tacked onto the beginning of similar books. In fact, I can think of no similar book. After a dedication “To my grandsons’ generation, hoping that they are learning some lessons we learned too late, and that they will pursue them with creative energies. And to New Mexico, one of the loves of my life,” each page is laid out in art book form, with a strip of compelling images along the top, their captions, attributions, and often a bit of additional information along the bottom, and in between a continuous text in which the author ponders what is being done to the land and a range of acts of resistance to the devastation we carry on to our peril.
This is a book about land and its riches, about water and its overuse, about mining and its residue, about First Peoples and current peoples and the everyday or long range choices we make. The images are every bit as fascinating as the text; more than “illustrations,” they tell a parallel story. Photographs of landscape and land art, maps, signage, artists’ works inspired by the land and its rape or constructed upon it, ancient rock art, protest, architecture from many eras, dams in construction and devastating operation, mounds, berms, movie sets, advertisements, and gravel pits, all pull us from page to page and through Lippard’s unfolding observations/rant/prayer/argument/analysis.
Undermining begins with gravel.
Gravel—an aggregate formed by water—became the unlikely inspiration for this book, a collage of concerns about the ways humans intersect with nature in the arid Southwest. The humble gravel pit offers an entrance to the strata of place, suggesting some fissures in the capitalist narrative into which art can flow. (pp 1-2).
Or, again, “Gravel is today’s plebian gem of choice—consistently valuable in the larger scheme.” (p. 27)
Some of the graphics are photographs by well-known artists. Others were taken by the author or discovered in archives. Some depict art objects. Others bring us up close and personal with types of adobe mud. Some are in color and some in black and white. Many are viewed from high above. Several are insistent close-ups. A few make excellent use of humor or irony.
In one we look through the windshield of a car at two motionless buffalo and through the car’s rearview mirror at the line of vehicles behind. (p 101) In several instances double-page spreads display photos that are mirror images of each other, emphasizing particular scenes or historic moments. When discussing the fall of the Twin Towers, rather than feature one of the several photographic images that are so iconic as to have become almost meaningless, Lippard uses black fields to denote that which is beyond imagery (imagination).
Central to this meandering but closely knit narrative and appearing early in it, Lippard establishes the role culture and art play in society:
Chiseled on the façade of an old grammar school in Fort Benton, Montana is this admonition: ‘INDUSTRY IS USELESS WITHOUT CULTURE,’ a message that still resonates in the post-industrial age. Culture is a far broader term than art and can embrace social energies not yet recognized as art. If much contemporary art appears divorced from the popular expectations of ‘fine arts,’ it remains a way of seeing, sometimes more connected to or embedded in life than previously expected. While entangling visual art with the cold realities of our current environment, some artists are realizing that they can envision alternative futures, produce redemptive and restorative vehicles with which to open cracks into other worlds, and rehabilitate the role of the communal imagination. Artists are good at slipping between the institutional walls to expose the layers of emotional and esthetic resonance in our relationships to place. They can ask questions without worrying about answers. (pp 8-9)
This is a book for the world. But its very specially a book for New Mexicans, and those of us who live in the gorgeous, drought-plagued and human-threatened southwestern United States, a land on the brink of devastation. Increasingly, many parts of the globe are like ours. Here, the wisdom of ancient inhabitants and modern day artists is overlaid, as it is everywhere, by insatiable greed and the expanding technologies that keep that greed ongoing.
One of many concepts that stays with me, is the author’s reference to John Fraser Hart’s definition of: “geography as curiosity about places.” It is Lippard’s deep curiosity, love of form’s evocation of content, and unyielding commitment to expose and heal our crimes against the elements that come together in this wonderfully satisfying book.
Because she pays as much attention to viewer as to site, and to time as to space, Lippard is evenhanded but pointed when assessing our relationship to our surroundings, natural or human made. She is kind to land artists, but her position is clear:
Most of us envision rather than visit the classic sites, where open space becomes a kind of mat within the frame around the photograph. Even if we have actually seen them, our impressions are mediated by the glamorous aerial photographs in publications, which are critical to earth art’s esthetic impact and dissemination. Early land artists without frequent access to the ‘timeless’ western deserts often adopted readymade pits (quarries in New Jersey, for instance), where the ‘timeliness’ of nearby skyscrapers could be ignored. (pp. 82-83)
Despite Undermining’s collage nature, there is a powerful progression in this book, a point to be made. Or several points. Lippard tells us her constant mantra is “long-term thinking is in short supply,” and she documents this affirmation with hundreds of examples: of corporate criminality and citizen ignorance or lethargy. And then there are the protests that resonate, the culture/art that speaks truth to power.
Lippard writes: “In the west, it’s been said, nature is politics and politics nature.” And she quotes nature writer Terry Tempest Williams:
I believe we are in the process of creating our own mythology, a mythology born out of this spare, raw, broken country, so frightfully true, complex, and elegant in its searing simplicity of form . . . the high points of excursions into the Colorado Plateau are usually points of descent. Down canyons. Down rivers. Down washes left dry, scoured and sculpted by sporadic flash floods.
And Lippard adds:
Down under the land we walk on, more toxic subterranean substances are entering the bodies of southwesterners (and now northeasterners and midwesterners as well) in the form of the unknown chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing (fracking) for oil and natural gas, in which enormous amounts of water and toxic chemicals are blasted into deep rock to release resources that would be unprofitable to extract any other way. Fracking fluids are generally 99.5 percent water—bad enough. The remainder is a horrific mix of some 750 chemicals that can include, acids, xylene, tuolene, benzene, formaldehyde, polyacrylamides, chromates, diesel fuel, hydrochloric acid, gels, and methanol. The fracking process has been in use for some sixty years, though the addition of horizontal drilling in the past decade provoked the current boom. ‘Pumping fractures rock. Fluid invades fracks. Oil comes to Papa,’ is how one engineer explained it. (pp. 140-141)
Following this and many other examples of human endangerment of our land, water, air and other non-sustainable resources, Lippard indicates a direction, possibility, incipient remedy. Awareness, first and foremost; and this book aids greatly in that awareness. Then resilience and resistance. And finally the product of her feminist art historian’s and curator’s understanding:
Where devastated landscapes provide fodder for photographic advocacy and raw materials for land art, the next hopeful step—in tandem with progressive land use politics—is a focus on actual recycling, reclamation, or remediation. (pp 176-177)
She goes on to note the “hundreds of thousands of exhausted sites littering the national landscape, waiting to be made meaningful,” names several of them, and quotes Wes Jackson of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, when he urges “agricultural polyculture to replace our disastrously expanding monocultures: ‘There’s more to be discovered than invented.’” She speaks of Superfund sites that need superfunding, and money for art that is way way down on the list. And she lists the endless national and local bureaucracies that stand in the way of such movement.
All of us concerned with the intersections of art, nature, and society (or ‘political ecology’) need to learn how to read these competitive bureaucracies….If we fail to heal what Karl Marx called ‘our metabolic rift with nature,’ it will just go on without us. New species will arise to replace those we have killed off. We need nature. Nature doesn’t need us . . . The model for reclamation art is often nature itself, in response to society’s interventions. (pp. 178-179).
Undermining is a textbook for our time, a brilliant rumination from a brilliant writer, and a book to go back to for hope as well as out of despair.
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