Earthen fare

Lightning rarely hits Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field and visitors to James Turrell’s Roden Crater may be shot at by paranoid ranchers. You won’t find these tips in most books about land art, but Erin Hogan’s Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West (University of Chicago Press, $20) will be much handier when you’re wondering whether to try the Saddle Sore bar in Montello, Nevada (pop. 255).

“Land art” usually describes a movement that lasted from the late 1960s through the 1980s, when Minimalist artists fled the frustrations of the New York art world to make monumental works with the environment itself as their medium. In the summer of 2004, Hogan—who holds a doctorate in art history from U. of C. and has served as the Art Institute of Chicago’s director of public affairs since 2006—drove her Volkswagen Jetta for three weeks and 3,000 miles through Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas so she could see masterpieces of land art, such as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, outside a textbook.

Along the way, the self-described urbanite confronts her fear of solitude. Once she arrives in Utah, Hogan braves unpaved roads with no cell-phone coverage, harsh desert conditions, overly friendly meth addicts, curious cattle, debilitating anxiety and “vodka tonics” made with Diet 7-Up. The stunning landscape is as foreign to Hogan as her desire to see the four concrete tubes of Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels is to the patrons of the Saddle Sore.

Yet for Hogan, the trip was a transformative experience. “What we see in museums is very important and has its own epiphanic qualities, but it’s also important to get out in the world,” she said in a recent phone interview. When asked what she discovered out West, Hogan recalls, “I was surprised to realize that land art, which I had presumed to be about space, is actually about time.” Spiral Jetty, which Smithson completed in 1970 on the Great Salt Lake, is tiny compared with what Hogan had imagined, but the way the sun moves across the coil of rocks during an afternoon and the layers of pink and white salt that have accreted there over the years affected her profoundly. Hogan’s first view of Lightning Field’s 400 stainless-steel poles was uninspiring, but after witnessing a sunset and sunrise at the 1977 installation during her obligatory 24-hour stay, she writes, “[T]he atmosphere itself, the air and the light, becomes so powerful that one can’t experience anything else.”

Spiral Jetta is as much about Hogan’s misadventures as it is about the land art on her itinerary, some of which she couldn’t find. “You could see it as an art book with a travel component or a travel book with an art component,” she says. But instead of intruding on her analysis of the art she encounters, Hogan’s personal anecdotes address issues that more conventional art books would ignore: She’s so impressed by Utah’s Hole n’’ the Rock, the cave-home that artist Albert Christensen carved in the 1950s, that she wonders why Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969)—a 1,500-foot-long trench dug into a Nevada mesa, which is almost indistinguishable from its surroundings—has received more acclaim. The pieces Hogan visits are almost always disconnected from the communities where they were made. (This problem is most acute in Marfa, Texas, where hordes of art tourists descending upon artist Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation have exacerbated the town’s racial and economic tensions.) Considering that locals’ reactions to land art range from “indifference to bemusement to antagonism,” according to Hogan, for whom are these works intended?

Hogan’s book is an entertaining read, but the author refuses to provide easy answers to her questions. She says she wants readers to make their own land-art pilgrimages: “If you’re open to it, [art] can teach you something…whether it’s a painting or a pile of rocks.”

Spiral Jetta comes out Sunday 1. Chicago’s closest equivalent to land art is Turrell’s Skyspace (2006) at the southwest corner of Halsted Street and Roosevelt Road.