LAND ARTS OF THE AMERICAN WEST
"We will travel and camp to directly experience the ground-truth of our itinerary, visiting sites of art, architecture, geology, industry, infrastructure, and science."
The Land Arts of the American West program has been active since 2000. It brings students from the University of New Mexico, UT-Austin, and The College of Architecture at Texas Tech deep into the field of the American West for 8000 miles and 50 days. The program gives students direct experiences of the complex social and ecological processes that produce contemporary landscapes. It frames landscapes that often contain hidden infrastructures and/or monumental infrastructures--past and present--as:
- an amalgam of geologic forces shaping the land itself and the complex interaction of cultural and ecological actions
that define landscape
- land art”--meaning the full gamut from scratches in the surface of rocks to roads, dwellings, monuments and military-industrial installations
Chris Taylor, co-founder of the program, values the program's emphasis on an extensive, sometimes extreme field experience because "out in the landscape distinctions between art, the built environment and politics erode and enable readings unbound by the limitations of disciplinary isolation... things in the field are messier than they first appear."
In a recent interview, Chris Taylor described how some of the field sites are selected for their messy juxtapositions of the "natural," social, cultural, economic, military, infrastructural, geo-, and eco-forces that shape them:
image: Land Arts of the American West
Other sites are selected for the opportunities they give students to experience iconic works of Land Art not only directly but provocatively. Last year's field semester took students to Michael Heizer's Double Negative, where students used a laser scanner to generate an entirely new way to perceive, experience, understand, and relate to the earthwork.
Michael Heizer's Double Negative, image: Land Arts of the American West
students scanning Double Negative with laser equiment, image: Land Arts of the American West
Double Negative scanned, image: Land Arts of the American West
Taylor describes points of "saturation" reached by participants in the field experience. Inevitably, comfortable assumptions about self, other, land, nature, infrastucture, and ecology get challenged and reshaped during the field semester. Old ways of seeing fail to hold up under compounding layers of complexity, history, agendas regarding land use, and the insights and creative responses to place and space by artists, educators, writers, and scholars on the trips.
image: Land Arts of the American West
The pedagogical emphasis is on complete immersion; collaboration in work, play and living; and choreographing multi-disciplinary cohort groups into encounters with complexities that unsettle "disciplinary isolation" and boundary-holding.
In 2007, Chris Taylor collaborated with Incubo to bring the pedagogy of Land Arts of the American West to the Atacama Desert in Chile. The project was described as:
"ATACAMA LAB will bring the interpretive frame and working methods of Land Arts of the American West to Chile, expanding the definition of earthworks and opening an exchange along the north-south axis of the Americas. Public events in Santiago will bring together artists, architects, designers, and scientists to discuss these expanding definitions. Followed by a ten-day fieldwork session in the Atacama Desert, where we will explore their implications, visiting sites of art, architecture, infrastructure, and science to make our own work in direct response to the landscape.
- ATACANA LAB 07 website
Making shade for lunch, Salar de Atacama, Chile, 9 October 2007. image Chris Taylor: Atacama Lab 07
image:Chris Taylor, Atacama Lab 07, On top of the Overland for a better view of the lithium operation, Salar de Atacama, Chile, 8 October 2007
A group effort to construct a fog catcher, Punta Patache, Chile, 15 October 2007. image: Chris Taylor Atacama Lab 07