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See other Writings Words on THE LANDby J. A. Lee (2004) An art site in New Mexico THE LAND/an art site, Inc., maintains a twenty-acre site about eighty miles southeast of Albuquerque, NM, as a venue for environmental art. The setting is typical of central New Mexico's arid mountain landscape: stands of piñon and juniper encircling a meadow of desert grasses, yucca, and cholla cactus; a sharply rising rocky ridge with a view of the surrounding Manzano Mountains; an arroyo that is almost always dry. Directors Thomas Cates and E. Nuevo, along with guest curators, have been mounting shows on the site since 1997, featuring the work of installation artists, video and sound artists, architects and engineers, poets, musicians and dancers, among others. One show was installed entirely on the Internet - very low-impact. In 2000, Nuevo and Cates established THE LAND/an art site, Inc., as a nonprofit organization.
An artist spending time at THE LAND usually leaves language behind. It's a contemplative experience enjoyed mainly in silence (not the land's silence, but the artist's), and it can be extraordinary, even transcendent, to absorb through the senses without recourse to naming or describing. This experience provokes questions about the nature of language itself— and paradoxically, for me, is worth talking about and, I think, making art about. Most of us are artists or writers in part because we have a particular need to tell about things, and when we reenter the flow of language, we look for a vocabulary for telling. It can be a vocabulary of objects and images, or of words, or both. Environmental art is about making us more aware of its (and our) surroundings, and looking for new ways to examine our relationship with the environment as a living thing. We use words, among other tools, to mediate for us in that relationship, and our understanding of nature and of the environment is bound up with how we use the words "nature" and "environment." We approach the things of the earth in part through the nouns we have invented to identify them, the verbs we use to codify their functions and activities, and the adjectives with which we describe their features. We use names to claim ownership of things. Words can be used to describe a thing or idea, or to take its place. We also use words to celebrate and to caution.
These questions can be explored in ways almost as varied as language itself. I'd like to see pieces that use words as abstract forms, as environmental sounds, and in more traditionally communicative written or spoken texts ranging from haiku (2) to harangues to collections of quotations to uncompromising ecological tracts. Words can be written on rocks, trees, earth or, if you can figure out a way to do it, water or air, and using any number of media from a finger in the soil to chalk, charcoal or crayon to sticks, soil, clay, or plant matter; installed as objects in an equally wide variety of forms and media; or declaimed, sung, shouted, whispered, or recorded and played back.
It's true that, as a rule, the plastic arts exist to say what words can't. But art breaks rules. It's also true that words can be shifty, inexact, and often beside the point. That makes them interesting (and maddening). They can also be a rich source of ideas for making art, and environmental art is, among other things, about ideas. There are as many ideas yet to be explored in making art on the land as there are artists doing it, and, for me at least, experimenting with language as a medium is an especially provocative and promising one. - - - - - - - Want to comment on this article? Please share your thoughts in the Forum.
NOTES: (2) The classic haiku of Basho's era might be a model for site-specific textmaking: improvised on the spot, and usually noting some interaction of elements in the natural surroundings, using the simplest words, without metaphor or decoration. For a list of other artists on greenmuseum.org that look at text and language, scroll down to TEXT under CATEGORY in the Artist Index.
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