Undermining

Starred review from February 24, 2014
In this brilliant and penetrating fantasia on land use and exploitation, writer, activist, and curator Lippard (Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object) invites readers to join her stream of consciousness, taking off from her home “in one of the lower levels of a pit, an arid ancient seabed in northern New Mexico called the Galisto Basin.” The book gives equal weight to the verbal and visual, with words flowing along the bottom half of each page and photographs that blur the lines among documentation, journalism, and art along the top, traversing “cultural history and cultural geography” through the archeology and social politics of mineral rights, native rights, adobe, petroglyphs and graffiti; the glamour and exploitation of “cultural tourism” and earthworks/land art; and the oblivious actions of development and capitalism against water, ecological, and climate. She lands in exhilarating fashion on art as a catalyst for change: the political power of photography in the social landscape; the bravery of artists navigating stubborn and archaic bureaucracies to creatively remediate and regenerate superfund sites and brownfields; and new interdisciplinary programs and projects bridging art, science, city planning, and land use. This singular book will stir the “creative energies” of veteran Lippard fans and environmentalists as well as a new generation of artist-activists. 200 color photos.

March 1, 2014
Art historian and social critic Lippard (On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place, 1999, etc.) turns in another trademark work of inductive cultural tourism. Many of Lippard's books are a blend of discourse and art installation, at least after a fashion. This is no exception: On each page, a band of images speaks to the text below. That text, in turn, begins with an intensely local concern, namely, a gravel pit near her high desert home. Strap on postmodern headgear: "Gravel pits," writes the author, "provide a dialectical take on the relationship between my own three-and-a-half decades in the Lower Manhattan activist/avant-garde art community and two decades in Galisteo--a tiny New Mexico village (population 250)." Though the text is often self-indulgent along those lines, Lippard allows that just about everywhere you look in the Southwest, you'll find someone extracting something from the Earth, and that someone may be ever so slightly better, morally speaking, than the next someone. There are gravel pits, and then there are mines, including "the world's largest surface coal mine complex" in eastern Wyoming. From mines, with transitions that are a little jagged, Lippard moves on to the Earth artists of the West, such as Robert Smithson and James Turrell. Though the connections are not always clear, her eventual meditation on the cairn marking the Trinity nuclear site puts us back on the road from piled stones to stones in gravel pits, and if the conversation is absent-minded, it is nicely suggestive of things worth thinking about, such as the remnants of 9/11 that now lie buried in the Fresh Kills landfill of Staten Island. Art, garbage, history? Readers must be the judges. Centrifugal and sometimes hard to follow but always interesting, tracing the intersection of art, the environment, geography and politics.

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