A Meditation on the “Approach”
Cadillac Ranch, Amarillo, Texas (June 18, 2022)
It’s called an “access” road, but you can only drive so close. You park on the shoulder and continue the journey by foot. Most likely, you’re not alone. Loads of other people have come to this attraction, which amounts to many large objects in a field, surrounded by vast amounts of open space.
Together, you approach.
You enter through a cattle chute. All the bodies approaching the gate, once widespread and scattered, converge at the chute. All pass through the same point, single file.
These aspects of the experience are indispensable.
To one side, a trailer. Through a window, you trade money for cans of the “official” spray paint. To buy paint is a minor, optional, pause in the approach.
Now you keep walking. On the ground, previous visitors have spray-painted messages, some as simple as “hello.” Others have included their names and social media handles, followed by advertisements, slogans and calls-to-action. (“Follow me”)
Every step brings you closer. As seen from the access road, these Cadillacs half-buried in the ground were as small as your thumb. Now they rise up.
Consider those who walk with you, who share your approach, and those who have already arrived. They represent two different aspects of the experience: journey and destination.
Consider those for whom the approach has ended. They mill about, take photos, spray messages and designs onto the Cadillacs. Having completed their approach, they become part of yours. Remarkable.
Very soon now, you and I will reach the Cadillacs. We will cross a threshold, that is, pass through a moment, at which time we will no longer be approaching the art. We will cleave from the spectators approaching and cleave to the spectators who have arrived.
We approach. We arrive. As for the exact moment when this threshold is crossed, who knows? It can be anticipated but not pinned down. It can only be reduced to these two moments – before and after.
One moment, we are approaching. Suddenly, we are inseparable from the exhibit. We have become details comprising the approach of those walked behind us at a distance, with whom we once were joined in approaching. We recognize this transformation retroactively.
We are minor details, yet inseparable from whatever makes their experience an individuation of the generalized experience. We recognize our participation in their experience retroactively.
And here we are now, up close, close enough to touch each of the 10 Cadillacs half-buried in the ground, covered in layers of spray paint. Layer after layer, one added to another, like strata of the earth, each layer a historical record of the visitors’ temporary interactions.
(I was told that every so often, the curators remove the layers. The accumulation begins anew.)
Up close, the smell of spray paint dominates. Bottle caps and cans fill the trash barrels. The winds, which are quite strong, pick up and carry the lightest ones, the least secured, and strew them around the grounds.
A woman sits on the hood of a Cadillac, flip flops dangling from her feet, her feet dangling through the space where a back window would be. She draws a design with red and black cans of paint. The spray splatters her blue coveralls. Her companion wears a cap with a flap to protect his neck from the sun. He snaps photos of her at play.
Here, visitors, spectators, and critics are on solid ground. Poets, too, know what to do before the object and will not find it too difficult to compose their ekphrases. And many will be good but deficient in their appreciation of the approach.
Seven Magic Mountains, Las Vegas, Nevada (July 19, 2022)
The “approach” as a physical act is routine, so much so that the aesthetic implications are taken for granted. Yet the experience is indispensable to appreciating certain types of land art.
Consider “Seven Magic Mountains,” an installation in the desert, about 26 miles from Las Vegas, far enough to be set apart from the Strip and its monuments, but close enough that you can drive there and back, no problem.
Not unlike your visit to Cadillac Ranch, the drive to Seven Magic Mountains takes you down a rural road, where you pull into a parking lot that is still distant from the objects. From this distance, you see the painted rocks piled in pillars. They appear small. You also notice the people at the pillars, those who have arrived. They are even smaller.
You leave your car and join the visitors who have also recently parked. Spread out but together, you initiate the approach.
It hardly matters whether you are tired or energized, sad or happy. It hardly matters whether you’re in a hurry or not. The field created by the art and its approach is open enough for all possible states of being. In other words, for every visitor, it affords a potential for response and reaction.
This suggests to me that the approach is a process and a phase. It reveals itself as a twilight period, murky time during which your feelings, expectations, and predetermined judgments are suspended in anticipation. Your affective state is background material. In the foreground, something else takes center stage. This something is a state during which you — the visitor, spectator, critic, poet — are most vulnerable.
Regardless how you feel during the approach, you don’t know what will happen when the approach is complete, when you stand before and among the objects on display. You don’t know how you will feel until you the approach is complete.
What once was given will be tested imminently.
Some self-assurances will be verified. Some, proven to be falsehoods, inaccuracies, dishonesties, mendacities, misrepresentations, deceits.
Land Art as Genre and the “Approach” as a Convention
The experience I’m attempting to describe is characteristic of land art. It has the status of a convention. It is formally and structurally related to the aesthetics of the genre.
Then again, every encounter with an art object involves an approach. Consider “Last Conversation Piece,” perhaps my favorite sculpture of all time, at one of my favorite museums, the Hirshorn in Washington, DC.
The sculpture is outside the building, near the entrance. It is obscured on the Constitution Avenue side by a wall. Approaching it from the Mall, one can see it from a distance, but the distance is relatively short. And though you may be approaching it with others in proximity, they are more than likely headed for the entrance to the museum. If they’ve never been, the sculpture is a secondary destination, a surprise. There are other sculptures along the way, so one thing that is lost in this type of approach is a sense of isolation, the weirdness of human-created art in settings largely devoid of any other human creation.
Now, take the sculpture garden at the Hirshorn, which is located on the Mall. It is a dedicated space, marked off by walls and paths. It’s not particularly expansive compared to other sculpture gardens, but it is dense with sculpture. Here, the approach as I conceive it is not activated. There is no corresponding experience. One walks toward a sculpture, which may be larger and more imposing than the vehicles at Cadillac Ranch, but the twists and turns are that of a maze. The distance one covers to approach the sculptures is analogous to walking inside a museum, as one moves from room to room, object to object
So what, if any, edges, boundaries, or contours distinguish the “approach” one experiences in conjunction with land art?
I offer two features as a point of departure:
The art is outdoors, isolated in open space, far from other objects. In this genre, the approach is activated by the isolation of the objects in relatively vast amounts of open space. Furthermore, the space must be unobstructed; that is, the objects must be in view from a relatively far distance if the approach is to exist.
A question: What is the minimum amount of space that must surround an object before this “approach” is possible?
The approach is designated by fixed paths. The approach begins for everyone at the same point. In contrast, consider “Gyre” by Thomas Sayre at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Though the objects can be seen from a distance and are largely unobstructed from view, there is no single point of entry. They can be approached from virtually any direction. There are no chokepoints, fences, borders, boundaries, etc. to direct an observer. The journey from close to far is an approach, but it lacks a key feature of the phenomenon I’m describing, specifically the knowledge that others have passed this way as well.
“Dinosaurs on the Prairie,” Napoleon, North Dakota (June 5, 2021)
The approach is a fundamental feature of the genre. To argue this point, I offer “Dinosaurs on the Prairie,” an attraction like Cadillac Ranch and Seven Magic Mountains insofar as it comprises objects isolated and arranged in a wide-open space. In terms of the genre, it meets the basic criteria, yet it lacks the convention under examination — an approach.
Given the parallels, the patterns, the homologies, that Dinosaurs on the Prairie shares with the other examples, one would expect an “approach.” For instance, to say the objects are isolated is an understatement. Whoever treks to this out-of-the-way anomaly did not simply exit from an interstate highway. You do not visit on a daytrip from a nearby city. You visit this place intentionally (or coincidentally, as in, I’ve only been because my spouse grew up in a nearby town). However, once you arrive before this huge plain with fields and nothing else around for miles except farmland, you are prevented from approaching the objects. A fence blocks your patch.
A parking lot and a fence. You may observe and admire the attraction from afar, but you cannot, as in the previous examples, get close to the objects, (the threshers (the dinosaurs)). That is, there is no entrance, no way to pass through the fence and activate the approach without the intent to trespass.
So, the approach exists after all. As a feature of the genre, the approach is confirmed by its absence. In this case, the approach is subtracted from the experience, but its absence is understood as deviation from the genre.[1]
Having satisfied myself that something called the “approach” exists, here I’d like to say something speculative about aesthetics. I’ll begin with a question: If the approach is a convention, what does it mean to deviate from the expectations of the genre I’ve described?
Deviations from genres can be understood as choices, accidents, innovations, mistakes – the list goes on — but the dissimilarity itself fixates our attention, generates endless questions, such as what purpose do the deviations they serve – aesthetically, politically, ideologically, practically?
More to the point, what is the purpose of thwarting the approach?
Specifically, what does the fence mean?
I find it strange. If the primary purpose is to prevent an approach, here the fence makes little sense. It is easy to trespass and get away with it. It’s unlikely that anyone will drive by and see you. If they do, and if they care enough to stop, you would be asked to leave. That’s all.
So why the fence? Why create an obstacle to the approach, a fundamental feature of the genre?
There is an obvious answer – this is a working farm. The fence isn’t meant to keep you out. It’s meant to keep cattle in.
But there are other answers, symbolic answers. The fence coordinates with other signs to mark the attraction as an attraction. It functions as a sign that these objects constitute an attraction and not a random dumping ground for obsolete farm equipment. Other signs include the parking lot, which is not clearly delineated, and a billboard that gives the attraction a name.
There is one other sign – the arrangement of the threshers. Their arrangement suggests human intent, deliberate choice, but it is only a suggestion. Without the other signs, one might wonder if the arrangement was an accident.
[1] From a different vantage, one might argue that the approach is not in fact thwarted, that transport to the attraction constitutes the approach. In this reading, the attraction is so far from any concentrated urban center that an intention to visit is requisite. Therefore, the approach is elongated. In other words, one makes a pilgrimage to see Dinosaurs on the Prairie. For various reasons, I don’t take this point of view. I consider the travel aspect of a pilgrimage to be fundamentally different from the approach under discussion, though they may intersect in interesting ways.