New West Book Review

Land Art Rover: Erin Hogan’s “Spiral Jetta”

By Jenny Shank, 8-11-08

Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip Through the Land Art of the American West
By Erin Hogan
University of Chicago Press
180 pages, $20

My husband announced one day that he and my daughter had been out making “land art.” The next time I walked out back I saw what he meant: they had gathered dozens of dandelions and arranged them in a yellow streak flowing down a channel in a boulder, the sort of thing artist Andy Goldsworthy did in Thomas Riedelsheimer’s beautiful documentary Rivers & Tides.  I’m a little hesitant to admit this, but we’re land art junkies.  We’ve been to see Goldsworthy’s work at the Storm King Art Center in New York, and we’ve made a pilgrimage to Dia: Beacon, the New York museum that is the hub of the Dia Foundation, which funds and maintains much of the land art in the American West. 

But we haven’t been to see Robert Smithson’s famous “Spiral Jetty” in Utah, and we live only one state away from it, so we can’t claim any real cred, unlike Erin Hogan, who braved endless miles, desert heat, poor directions, rutted roads, loneliness, and dubious bar company to take readers to the “Spiral Jetty” and beyond in her endearing first book, Spiral Jetta.  The title references her vehicle, the little black Volkswagon Jetta that could, tackling tough terrain to bring her to a handful of widely-spaced art destinations throughout the West.

Hogan set out from Chicago, aiming for Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” on the shore of the Great Salt Lake near Corinne, Utah.  Hogan admits that she was somewhat ill-equipped to cope with such a road trip into the heart of the rural West—she has an “urban sensibility” whose trappings include black clothes, short hair and “urban eyewear—titanium-framed glasses designed by a German.” She spends several nights in Salt Lake City, and has some misadventures, choosing an exit from the highway that routed her to State Street, “on what has got to be the wrong side of the tracks, something I—perhaps naively—didn’t realize was possible in a Mormon town.” (This reminds me of once when I was discussing the Denver high school I attended with a woman from Chicago and she exclaimed, “They have gangs in Denver?")

Hogan is director of public affairs at the Art Institute of Chicago, so she surely could have unleashed lots of abstruse art criticism, but for the most part she writes for the intelligent amateur, dropping in quotations from art critics in a sparing and relevant way.  The Spiral Jetta is the perfect read for those who enjoy contemporary art but don’t have an academic background in it, and it doubles as a fine Western road trip narrative.  Hogan is candid about her experiences of the art she encounters—when she’s bored or tired or under-whelmed, she lets the reader know, and she’s got a great sense of humor, which makes the long miles with her pass easily.

Hogan locates the “Spiral Jetty” through some directions she found on the Internet that include such landmarks as “an abandoned, pink and white trailer (mostly white).” Getting there requires a tooth-rattling jaunt on an unpaved road.  When she arrives, she encounters a few other art pilgrims and is surprised at the size of Smithson’s work, which appears “monumental” in photos, but is actually “incredibly intimate, dare I say, even tiny.  You can walk its spine in just a few minutes; three or four giant steps can cover the ground between the loops.”

Next Hogan hopes to tackle Nancy Holt’s “Sun Tunnels,” “four giant concrete tubes…in the middle of nowhere, positioned such that at dawn and sunset on the summer and winter solstices, the sun rises and sets in alignment with the tubes.” But the road out to the piece’s northwest Utah location is even worse and the directions more obscure.  Hogan drives for hours without finding it, and when a storm threatens, she turns back.  But this ending turns out just as happily for the reader, because Hogan then stops for a drink in Montello, where she runs into several colorful characters, including the police chief of Wendover and a talkative meth-user named Maurice who says of her experience trying to find “Sun Tunnels”: “You hit up against the golden rule of the West.  In the West, you either fix it, or walk back.”

From there Hogan visits Moab, where she wonders if the natural beauty of the West might be more compelling than any of the art she’s been seeking.  She visits a tourist attraction called “Hole n” the Rock,” a home carved into the side of red rock that impresses her with its earnestness and ingenuity.  From there she visits Michael Heizer’s “Double Negative,” another difficult-to-find piece, a crevasse dug into Mormon Mesa that you can’t see until you’re on top of it.  She’s unsuccessful on her mission to visit James Turrell’s “Roden Crater” in Arizona, and it begins to seem that land artists like to make it willfully difficult to access their art. 

One of her last stops, Walter De Maria’s “Lightning Field,” at first frustrates Hogan, as it consists of “four hundred stainless steel poles poked into a nearly flat plain,” and when she views it in the middle of the afternoon, it doesn’t move her.  “I had yet to have an experience that truly lifted me out of myself and reengaged me with a sense of awe and wonder.  If pressed, I had to admit that the natural landscape was doing more for me in this regard than the works I was out there to see.” But then sunset comes, and “Lighting Field” is hit with changing, multicolored light, and Hogan finally experiences the connection with art amid nature that she had been craving.

Spiral Jetta is a diverting, insightful look at the land art of the American West and the characters Hogan encountered along the way to viewing the art.  It will also make a fine companion for anyone wanting to visit these artworks themselves.

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