White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World

3

Maybe because of some fluke of geomorphology, certain places in a landscape develop a special quality. A slight indentation becomes moist, a river runs through it. This becomes a fertility site, devoted to the goddess, the earth mother. To mark the place people arrange a few stones in the symbolic shape of a phallus or vagina so that its power is increased, enclosed, harnessed. A childless couple go there and mutter a few pleasantries and, that very night, the wife conceives. News of this miracle spreads. People travel from afar, hoping for a similar result, believing that coming here will bring their shaming sterility to an end. And it works. Up to a point. Then it doesn’t. The explanation is obvious: during a period of drought the river has dried up. Lacking any knowledge of meteorology, the people who live nearby, who have by now become dependent on the business generated by pilgrims, ask the priests (also dependent on the pilgrim trade) what to do. They decide that the only way forward is to moisten up the earth goddess with the blood of a few virgins or adolescent males. So they do that, and this previously nice place acquires an atrocious dimension which, far from cancelling out its sacred status, enhances it. Or maybe they enlarge the simple stone shrine and build something larger, along the lines of Angkor Wat or Salisbury Cathedral. Then, after an invasion or two, everyone forgets what it was for, and the place falls into disuse and ruin. But the accumulated effect of all these comings and goings lingers and seeps down into the foundations; by falling into ruin its primal circuitry is laid bare. Even when there are just a few stones left and no one knows what went on here, the place retains what D. H. Lawrence, in an essay on Taos Pueblo, called a kind of ‘nodality.’

Space in Time

We came to a place that seemed like nothing much: a homesteader’s cabin and a windmill, in the middle of a vast nowhere. The windmill must have been turning, because the wind was sprinting across the plateau. The sky was not just clear or blue. It was as if we’d ended up in a future where there was no atmosphere — no sky—to insulate earth from cosmos. Scrub extended into the distance, and in that distance were mountains, but even the things that were near were distant. The land was camouflage-coloured, the dust a dryish, dusty brown. The sagebrush was greyish green, as if emerging from a period of drought or hibernation. Near the cabin but still quite distant, almost invisible, were sticks stuck randomly in the ground — quite a lot of them, some in the far distance as opposed to the near distance but none in the very far distance, where we could not have seen them even if they had been there.

There were three bedrooms in the wood cabin. A fire, specifically a pellet-burning stove, was burning, but we did not linger inside. The air was thin, cold, the sun hot on one’s face. When the wind subsided, as it did every few minutes, it was still and quiet and warmer. As we walked towards the sticks it became obvious that there were more of them than we’d realized, though it was difficult to say how many, because many were hard to see and some were not see-able at all, and it is probably only in retrospect, once we had understood that their being invisible was part of their function, that we knew they were there.

The sticks, it became evident, once we got close to them, were not sticks but poles: polished steel, shining in the sun. Reflected down the middle of the first one I came to was a long blue smear: me, my reflected self, distorted and elongated almost to nothing. The poles were sharply pointed, roughly three times my height. They were absolutely vertical, two inches in diameter and cold to the touch, inanimate and inorganic. If they had been tall wooden sticks they could have been planted hundreds of thousands of years ago; being stainless steel, they were, obviously, of more recent provenance. Hundreds of years from now they would still gleam like a promise of the future.

We continued walking until there were poles on all sides, surrounding us, but because they were a long way apart — so far apart one could easily forget they were there — it was the opposite of feeling hemmed in, as if by a forest. Still, it was difficult to detect any pattern or order, and unless you were right next to a pole there was nothing much to look at. The most eye-catching objects were the cabin and the windmill. The cabin was low and squat, hugging the ground, determined to stay put in the face of whatever forces — meteorological, economic — might try to persuade it to budge. Our approach was different. We moved away from each other, in different directions. Being here encouraged us to separate, but we all felt this urge and so the urge to be separate was shared, communal. It was seeing the others, realizing how far away they were, that brought home how far into the distance the poles extended.

The sky was still nothing — no cloud, no anything. Perhaps the poles played a part in this. We rely on scenarios and correspondences to make sense of the world. It was very windy. If there had been a flag it would have blown out straight, proud and American, and there was a suggestion of flag because of the abundance of poles and wind, but there were no flags. It wasn’t just that there happened not to be any flags. There was an implied absence of flags.

‘We’re a small number of people in a very large space,’ Ethan said, walking to within talking distance. ‘The poles make you come back to a single question: what difference do the poles make? Their effect is both slight and absolute.’ We were standing side by side, looking into the distance, Western-style, and then we drifted apart again. The wind was strong enough to make the poles quiver, as if shivering from the cold.

At some point everyone convened at the cabin. I was the last man in and could see the other members of our expedition sitting on the wooden porch, in wooden rockers and on wooden benches, drinking champagne, watching me walk towards them. It was the kind of hut you see in Walker Evans’s photographs from the 1930s. What had seemed noble but squalid then seemed idyllic now, especially with the champagne and laughter.

‘In a way it’s the greatest boutique hotel in the world,’ said Jessica as I joined them on the porch. She was right. There were none of the things that make a place horrible: damp carpet in the bathrooms, depressing curtains or floral bedspreads. There was just this wooden cabin, shelter in a shelterless world.

As the sun moved though the absent sky the poles sprouted shadows. The tips sparkled as if stars had perched on them. The sun began to drop towards the horizon; the poles became far more clearly defined. Perspective became an issue in that there was none. Or, rather, there were so many competing perspectives that they complicated each other and cancelled each other out. Though still slender, the poles acquired bulk, solidity, which they did not have before. They were far more visible now and there were far more of them. Even the ones which were a good way off were brighter. It was obvious, as well, that they had been planted in rows. If you positioned yourself next to one and looked past it you could see a dozen more, glowing, almost like a fence that could keep nothing out, that let everything through, namely the sunlight and the wind. In each direction there were poles arranged in some kind of grid. The sun was sinking fast and everything began changing fast. The silver poles glowed goldly. It was possible to see the extent of the grid, to see where it ended. There was a clear demarcation now between the area where there were poles and the area where there were no poles, even though the poles were arranged so sparsely and sparingly as to have made the distinction imperceptible at first.

Steve said, ‘It’s the perfect temperature, except it’s about twenty degrees too cold.’ But at least the wind was no longer a factor. The wind had left. Now there were just the still poles. It seemed that a very short time after Steve had said what he said we were all spread out again. Everything was still. Everyone could see everyone else. The nearest person to me was Anne, who had spent the last hour walking round with a champagne glass in her hand like a guest at the most poorly attended party ever. Her glass, for most of that hour, had been empty.

The sky grew bluer, was becoming dark, and the poles now were absolutely solid. There was a sense — all the more palpable in such a remote and empty place — of something gathering. We were in the midst of what may once have been considered a variety of religious experience. Absence had given way to presence.

The sky blackened and we retreated indoors. We ate quesadillas and drank dark wine and looked at the flames of the pellet-burning stove as if it were a television. The vastness outside made the interior of the cabin seem the coziest place on earth, like an igloo but made of wood and not even chilly.

Later we went outside again, into the huge night. The poles were gone, but we knew they were there. The sky was nothing but a dome of stars. We’d all been in star-studded places before, were no strangers to the firmament, but none of us had seen anything like this. Viewed from most places on earth, stars tend to be overhead. Here they poured down all around to our ankles, even though they were millions of light-years away. I am not entirely clear about astronomy, but it seemed possible that the Milky Way was obscured by the abundance of stars. The constellations were complicated by passenger jets, blinking planes, flashing satellites: rush hour in the era of interplanetary travel. The sky was frantic, the night as cold as old starlight.

I woke as the uncurtained window turned grey. Three of us met outside. It was colder than ever, as cold as the Antarctic on the nicest day of the year. The sun was peeping over the mountaintops. As at sundown, the tips of the poles began to blink and twinkle. Then, as the sun emerged into view, the poles stood stark and golden, even more sharply defined than they had been the evening before. We could see everything now, in all its clarity. This was not just because of the light. It was also, Cristina said, because we now knew what we were looking for.

When we emerged again, after breakfast, the poles were less prominent, on the way to becoming almost invisible, as they had been when we arrived. That was our first revelation: that while the grid was completely static it unfolded over time as well as in space. A narrative was at work.

. .

People like us came and observed versions of this sequence every day for six months of every year. A day was the measure of what went on here. The experience was affected by the weather, the seasons, but not by the larger movement of the planets and stars. Places like Stonehenge had been designed with the solstice in mind, may even have been celestial calendars, attempting to synch man’s experience on earth with the heavens. None of that was relevant here. The placement of poles referred to nothing other than itself. Thousands of years of study would confirm that there was no intended relation between the poles and the position of the sun, the transit of Venus or lunar eclipses. What was here was entirely man-made and appealed only to man. Unlike some Chariot of the Gods—type places — the Nazca Lines in Peru, say — it was designed not to be seen from the air but to be experienced by people, on the ground.

We worked out that there were four hundred poles. Not 399 or 401 or 402. Exactly four hundred. The number, clearly, was no accident. The poles were in straight lines, but the area they covered was not a square. Two sides had sixteen poles and the other two had twenty-five, each 250 feet apart. The area covered was a mile by a kilometre and six metres.

Our final bit of measuring was to confirm what we referred to thereafter as the Ethan-Cristina paradox.

‘The poles are all different lengths,’ said Cristina (who is tall).

‘Because they’re all the same height,’ said Ethan (who is short).

He was right. They averaged about twenty feet, but the shortest was only fifteen feet, the tallest twenty-six feet nine inches. The variations in length took account of the uneven surface of the land, so that from tip to tip of every pole was this level plane of invisible flatness. Given the precision of all the distances involved, we wondered if this place was a tribute to the god of measuring? Did even the richly stocked pantheon of Hinduism include such a deity?

So the question remained. Apart from suggesting that precise measuring could correct the wonkiness of the world, what was this place meant to do? What was its purpose? Where were we?

The last question is easily answered: we were — as you may have guessed by now — near Quemado, at The Lightning Field, created by Walter De Maria and completed in 1977. The answer prompts another question — why the subterfuge of inconceivable ignorance? — which, in turn, takes the form of further questions.

A copy of De Maria’s obsessively minute inventory and visionary manifesto, ‘The Lightning Field: Some Facts, Notes, Data, Information, Statistics, and Statements,’ is left in the hut, but even before arriving — and even if their knowledge of the stats is a little hazy — most visitors who come to The Lightning Field know roughly what they are in for. But what if we came here and had to try to work it out for ourselves, with no art-historical back-up? Asked about the consequences of the French Revolution, Chou En-lai replied, ‘It’s too soon to tell.’ That’s the response that comes to mind when pondering the significance of the great Land Art projects of the late 1960s and 1970s. With their megalomaniacal schemes and gargantuan undertakings — some, like James Turrell’s Roden Crater in Arizona, or Michael Heizer’s City in Nevada, still uncompleted after more than forty years — these artists were thinking big, not just in size and space but in time. If they succeed, the best of their undertakings have more in common with sacred or prehistoric sites than with the rival claims and fads of contemporary art. The art stuff provides an immediate context, but it is more revealing to take a different and larger perspective.

One of the most obvious things is as easily overlooked as the poles in the middle of the afternoon: everything about The Lightning Field suggests that it will be here for many years to come. So what if we visited the site years hence and had to try to figure out for ourselves what was happening here, what forces were at work, with no art-historical context (minimalism, conceptualism, taking work out of the gallery into the expanded field, etc.)? Enlarging the time scale still further, what if The Lightning Field survived after there were people left to see it? How long would it take an alien intelligence — or, to put it another way, how intelligent would an alien have to be — to work out what was going on here? (Could that be the simple mark of genius: when something is easier to conceive and create than it is to work out how it was done?)

One thing present-day visitors tend not to know about The Lightning Field—or are reluctant to accept — is that it is naïve, even a little vulgar, to expect lightning. We came in early May, on only the second day that The Lightning Field had been open for the season, but even during the peak period of storm activity, July to September, lightning strikes are exceptional. De Maria spent years searching for an appropriate spot, somewhere with a high incidence of storms. He estimated that there are ‘approximately sixty days per year when thunder and lightning activity can be witnessed from The Lightning Field.’ I don’t know if any record has been kept of the number of lightning storms that have converged on the field itself, but you would count yourself very lucky if you happened to witness what must, surely, be one of the greatest shows on earth. De Maria has rightly insisted that the light is every bit as important as the lightning (‘the invisible is real’), but calling it The Lightning Field was a sensational bit of marketing. Does any artwork have a more electrifying name?

The fact that lightning so rarely appears does not detract from the intended purpose and effect of a place that is helpfully understood in Heideggerian terms. Seeking to explain the relationship of man-made objects to the surrounding landscape in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ Heidegger writes that a bridge ‘does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge expressly causes them to lie across from each other.’ From this it follows that the bridge effectively brings or leads the stream to flow under it and between these banks. ‘The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream. Thus it guides and attends the stream through the meadows.’

The tail wags the dog in similar and, for our purposes, more explicit fashion in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’ where Heidegger insists that a temple standing on rocky ground draws up out of the rock its ‘bulky yet spontaneous support.’ Furthermore, the building does not just hold its ground against the storm raging around it but ‘first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence.’ And not only that: ‘The lustre and gleam of the stone, though itself apparently glowing only by the grace of the sun, first brings to radiance the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of the night. The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air.’ [My italics.]

Notwithstanding this extraordinary sense of cause-generating effect, over the years voices have occasionally dissented from the consensually reverent view of De Maria’s achievement. The Dia Art Foundation (which administers the site) controls access to The Lightning Field and which photographs of it can appear in print. You can’t just drop in, take a quick look and drive off. You have to stay the night, and since the cabin accommodates only six people, you have to book well in advance. Taking aim at these ‘authoritarian’ measures in a briefly notorious essay, a critic named John Beardsley claimed that the build-up helped ‘insure that one will fully expect to see God at the Lightning Field. Needless to say, He doesn’t appear. No artwork could live up to this hype.’

Except it could and it does. Even without the bonus of lightning, the experience of The Lightning Field transcends its reputation. Of course god does not appear. There’s a lot of space but, even as a figure of speech, there’s no room for god. The Lightning Field offers an intensity of experience that for a long time could be articulated only — or most conveniently — within the language of religion. Faced with huge experiences, we have a tendency to fall to our knees, because it’s a well-rehearsed expression of awe. Nothing about The Lightning Field prompts one to genuflect in this way. Considering some archaeological sites, Lewis Mumford concluded, quite reasonably, ‘It is only for their gods that men exert themselves so extravagantly.’ The Lightning Field represents an absolute refutation or, more precisely, the expiration of that claim — unless art has now become a god. Rigorously atheistic, geometrically neutral, it takes the faith and vaulting promise of modernism into the wilderness. Part of the experience of coming here is the attempt to understand and articulate one’s responses to the experience.

Also, contrary to Beardsley’s griping, access is arranged in such a way as to maximise this experience. You leave your cars at Quemado and are taken up, in a group, at two-thirty in the afternoon. The drive takes half an hour, so you arrive at the least impressive time of the day. As we approached, a groan of disappointment swept through our party: we didn’t know exactly what we were expecting but we expected more. More what? More something. And then, gradually, you get it. You realize that this is not a piece of art to be seen but — the point bears repeating — an experience of space that unfolds over time.

This is one of the reasons why The Lightning Field is almost unphotographable. It is too spread out — and it takes too long. Everyone sees the same picture — the one on the cover of Robert Hughes’s American Visions—of a lightning storm dancing round the poles. That is what might be called the Lightning Field moment. Lightning may be rare in actuality, but it is right that The Lightning Field should be represented in this way. Every other attempt to reduce it to an image, a moment, sells it short.

Within the agreed limits of your visit — you’re taken up there and brought back — you can do whatever you like. Few religious sites permit such freedom of behaviour and response. You can drop acid. You can run around naked. You can drink a ton of beer and watch your woman pole-dance. You can sit on the porch reading about the Spiral Jetty. You can chant. You can chat with your friends. You can listen to music on your iPod, or you can just stand there with your hands in your pockets, shivering, wishing you’d brought gloves and a scarf. And then you have to leave.

We were picked up at eleven o’clock and driven back to Quemado. In a couple of hours the next bunch of pilgrims would be taken up there. If it hadn’t been for them — if it hadn’t been booked — we would all have stayed another night, for a week, for the whole summer.

As it was, we ate cherry pie in the El Sarape café and took some pictures to prove we’d all been here together. There’s a dusty Ping-Pong table in the otherwise deserted Dia office. Ethan and I played a couple of games before we all headed out of town.