ABQ / Santa Fe News

New West Author Interview

An Interview with Erin Hogan

By Jenny Shank, 11-03-08

Erin Hogan’s first book, The Spiral Jetta, is an entertaining account of the road trip she took through the American West in her Volkswagon Jetta, seeking the greatest hits of land art, including Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Michael Heizer’s Double Negative in Utah and Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field in New Mexico.  Hogan, the director of public affairs at the Art Institute of Chicago, recently answered some questions via email about why these artists were drawn to the West to create their works, how her perceptions changed over the course of the journey, and the fate of her Jetta.

New West: What first gave you the idea to embark on a land art road trip through the West?  Did you plan to write a book about it from the beginning?

Erin Hogan: I had actually wanted to take a trip like this for a while. I mentioned it to an editor friend of mine who said, “Absolutely! You should do this, and then you should write a book about it!” I wasn’t sure I could make a book out of it, but I did think I could write an article or two about the experience. So while I was on the trip I took a lot of notes and pictures and recorded people at these various sites. When I sat down later to start writing, well, I guess I had more to say than I thought I would, and it just grew into the book.

NW: You were surprised when you learned how small Spiral Jetty actually was.  Do you think it would be more compelling if it were realized on as grand a scale as you—and most others who see it only in photographs—envision it?

EH: That’s a hard question. I think that if Spiral Jetty had turned out to be as large as I had envisioned it, there’s no good way it could be experienced “on the ground.” Seeing something is so different than actually being in it. By this I mean that if it were truly huge, it could really only be seen well by flying over it; being “in it” would be very difficult, in the same way that being in a lake doesn’t give you a great sense of the scale of the lake. So it would be a more distant—and much different—experience if it were larger. In any event, it is what it is, and it’s hard to imagine what else it might be.

NW: It seems that before the trip, Spiral Jetty was one of your favorite artworks, or at least it was a piece of art that you had a strong desire to experience in person.  How do you feel about it now?

EH: I feel now that Spiral Jetty is like a really famous person whom I came to be friends with and found out that this famous person was really not that different from me. I expected awe and got intimacy. It wasn’t the experience I was expecting, but it was still a great experience—just one that was more accessible and less intimidating.

NW: In your chapter on Moab, you describe your reaction to the natural beauty of the landscape.  Why do you think that the artists you discuss were drawn to create their artworks in such settings?

EH: I’m sure there’s a dissertation somewhere on this question. No doubt there are a number of factors that led to the drive to create monumental works out in the West, including a general sense of exhaustion with the New York gallery scene and the commodification of art; a hankering for originality; and raw ambition. But I don’t want to discount stories like Robert Smithson seeking a particular shade of red out there in the world at large. Many of these artists were searching for things—like colors or a sense of scale or a feeling of unboundedness—that are only possible in the west. These are definitely aesthetic choices.

NW: Do you think that part of what makes land art unique is the way the viewer becomes a participant in the artwork?

EH: One of the things that I think is really interesting about the essay by the critic and historian Michael Fried that I refer to in the book is that he sees this level of viewer participation in all kinds of art, but most notably in minimalist art of just the preceding generation. I work at the Art Institute of Chicago and one of the pieces we have in the collection is Carl Andre’s Steel Aluminum Plain, which is essentially a checkerboard laid out on the floor. Andre encouraged people to walk on it, instead of walk around it. I think art of this era, not just land art, is characterized by a general level of physical engagement—whether walking on an Andre piece or climbing into Double Negative. It’s just that these land artists did it on such a huge scale.

NW: Many of the art sites that you planned to see proved difficult or impossible to find.  Do you think that the artists intended this?

EH: I think the artists were probably just looking for certain sorts of spaces—and the fact that they were remote was a byproduct of these particular spaces. I believe, in the end, that artists want their work to be seen. If the remoteness of the work demands a certain level of commitment from a viewer—well, that’s probably just a bonus to them.

NW: You mention attempting to visit one work-in-progress, City, by Michael Heizer.  The heyday of land artists was in the ‘70s, but are many other notable land artists working today?

EH: I had read about City but never tried to see it; I did try to see Roden Crater by James Turrell. But you are right that many of these works are still being made today. Heizer and Turrell were both working much earlier—in the heyday of the 1970s—so their current works should be seen as a continuation of the same project. But there are certainly younger artists who have picked up the torch, such as Andy Goldsworthy or even Maya Lin, who I think is doing really interesting site-specific environmental work like the Confluence Project.

NW: By the time you reached Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field in New Mexico, you were feeling frustrated that the art you’d seen wasn’t moving or impressing you as you hoped it would, and at first you thought this also might be another dud.  Lightning Field was redeemed when you saw it at sunset and sunrise.  Was it ultimately your favorite artwork that you saw on the trip?

EH: I hesitate to say that it was my favorite, because everything I saw had its merits. I’d say instead that it taught me the most. I feel that Lightning Field really showed me how to look at land art. Before I saw that work, I had just been bumbling around, driving, chatting, visiting, seeing. But Lightning Field showed me what I needed to do to really experience land art: spend time—not just an hour or two, but a day—with the pieces I wanted to visit. Duration is the key to really “seeing” land art. In this respect I wish I had seen Lightning Field first. I think I would have had very different, and more engaging, experiences with the other works if Lightning Field had been able to do its work on me at the beginning of the trip.

NW: Which of the other artworks you saw do you think are worth the trouble it took to see them?

EH: All of them have something to say. It’s funny—I’ve had a lot of e-mails from complete strangers who have read my book, and many of them say “Well, you didn’t miss anything by not seeing the Sun Tunnels.” But I’m not so sure. I’d like to think that the Sun Tunnels also has its own lesson. The disappointment that I experienced was, in the end, not about the works but about my not knowing how to really look at them.

NW: Was your Volkswagen Jetta any worse for wear after the trip?

EH: One thing I didn’t write about in the book was what happened to me after I left Marfa, Texas. My first real car trouble. I was driving, very late, through the northern tip of Texas, and I hit one of those blown-out tires from a semi-truck. It tore up the underside of my car and one of my wheel wells, and I had to have the car worked on in Oklahoma in order to make it back to Illinois. It wasn’t the car’s fault—it didn’t break down, but it did get wounded. And it’s still fine now. I drive it to work every day. It’s still ticking.

NW: Did the meth-user at the bar in Montello that you accidentally gave your phone number to continue to call?

EH: He did call once or twice after I got back to Chicago, but I didn’t answer. And that was that.

NW: Your book has received a lot of national attention, with positive reviews in the New York Times and the New Yorker, among others.  Is this unusual for a book about art published by a university press?

EH: I think the book review world, and the world of arts journalism in general, is completely unpredictable. So all I can say is that I’m pleasantly surprised and really pleased about the attention the book has received.

NW: What are you working on now?

EH: Same sort of thing, but different. (Isn’t that always the case?) I’m working now on a series of essays about amateur musicianship and the subcultures of amateur musicians. A few years ago I started trying to learn to play the fiddle and I got really immersed in the whole fiddling world, which is funny and fascinating and inspiring. So I don’t know what will happen with this, but it has been a great pleasure to dig into this world of fiddlers and their arguments about rosin and pentatonic scales and other very arcane but pressing questions.

Erin Hogan will speak with University of Colorado professor Patricia Limerick on the topic of “Manifest Legacies and the American West” on Saturday, November 8 at the Chicago Humanities Festival (The Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, South Gallery, 12:30p.m., $5).

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