Break the gallery habit this spring.
Art needs help. After centuries of surviving amid candlesticks, oil lamps and brazier smoke in churches and temples, art demands the aid of climate control and halogen lighting. After enduring endless genre-shifts, movements and manifestoes born in dimly lit studios and drafty villas, art prefers plywood-backed, perfectly finished sheetrock and plain, polished floors. It's understandable. Get rid of competing visual traffic and a work of art stands alone, ready for consideration on its
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merits, for its depths to be plumbed free of distraction, its brilliance to be noted in meditative appreciation. Thus the standard pristine white room that most galleries live by. Famed writer and curator Dave Hickey even launched his own career (and many others) from an Austin, Texas gallery called A Clean Well-lighted Place. Nod to Hemingway or no, it sums up what has come to be the gold standard of interacting with art. There's nothing wrong with it, but especially in the
Southwest, if you're limiting your art experience to galleries and museums, then your art experience is limited indeed.
Spring is as good a time as any, and better than many, to break the tyranny of indoor art with some outdoor exploration of unconstrained expression. SITE Santa Fe Director Laura Heon explains that there are two kinds of art one is likely to experience in the wild, "…'plonk' art, as we say in the trade, and site-specific art. Plonk art is made somewhere other than where it is shown and plonked down in public space. Site-specific art responds to the specificity of its site, either to the physical or the human surroundings, or both. The plonk art in this area of the country is not so hot in contrast, for example, to that of Paris, France, where they have specialized in plonk art for many centuries. But our region more than makes up for the paucity of plonk with an abundance of site-specific art, much of which is opened to the public. The purest expression of site-specific art is land art, and the land art in this area of the country is the best in the world. In fact, I would say that our region is to land art what Paris is to plonk art."
She's not wrong. The Southwest is bristling with legendary land art from famed minimalist Walter de Maria's installation,
The Lightning Field
, near Quemado, NM and Charles Ross' celestial registration project,
Star Axis
, near Las Vegas, NM to James Turrell's still-under-construction
Roden Crater
in Arizona and Robert Smithson's
Spiral Jetty
, surfacing as it sees fit, in Utah's Great Salt Lake. Though each within a day or a weekend of Santa Fe, not all of these works are easy to visit. Like
Roden Crater
,
Star Axis
is still in process (both were initiated in the '70s) but may be occasionally toured, most often through a museum or university. Seeing
The Lightning Field
, owned by the Dia Foundation, necessitates an overnight stay at a minimum of $150 per person. Other works are more casual and easily accessible, but all of them offer art in a surprising new context, as part of a much broader fabric and often with great aspirations.
Bill Gilbert, the Lannan Chair of Environmental Arts at the University of New Mexico, explains the change in context for an artist jumping from gallery to great outdoors: "The studio/gallery is about limiting the context spatially and sensorially largely as a means to focus the
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dialogue. In the gallery/white box we can control color, light, sound and smell and create a sense of suspended time. Outdoors we're faced with a much more open-ended, ever-changing situation, a dialogue in which we must contend, compete, align and incorporate with."
Fortunately, costly trips and rarified tours aren't the only way to get rid of the gallery blues and have an
en plein air
art experience. Hitting the streets on a tour of Santa Fe's public plonk art, from covered wagons and city park sculptures to commissioned bus stop mosaics, can be an alternative to blowing a sunny afternoon inside a museum. A sunset visit to
Stonefridge: A Fridgehenge
, the neo-druidic, recycled holy ground created at the former landfill by Adam Jonas Horowitz, can be a better experience than jostling shoulders with the wine and cheese crowd. And a casual stroll through the sculpture gardens on the grounds of Tesuque's Shidoni Foundry is close to home, free and a sure-fire way to pique the soul's interest in art that colors outside the lines of a traditional venue.
"For some people a completely urban existence lived entirely within human constructs is fulfilling," Gilbert says. "They treasure the rarified experience of art within the modernist temple or art mall. Personally, I figure culture is part of nature; why not extend the frame and see what happens? Whether that means art in the streets or in the canyons, it means moving beyond the zone of complete control into one that is dynamic."
Nancy Holt Lecture: March 26
Get a real feel for the landscape of land art when the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum presents a lecture by famed maven of outdoor installation, Nancy Holt.
Inside Out: Gallery Installations and Outdoor Sculpture
will feature Holt's presentation of her works in Utah, Washington, Virginia and Finland as well as details on her major gallery works.
Lecture 4:30 pm Sunday, March 26. $5. St. Francis Auditorium, Museum of Fine Arts, 107 W. Palace Ave, 946-1039 for reservations
