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Part II - Basin and Range
The Void and the Grid
The Great Basin is a desert region that stretches from the foot of the Wasatch Mountain Range in Central Utah to the Sierra Nevada Range that divides Nevada from California, named “basin” because none of its waters lead to an ocean. The region’s alpine lakes fuel rivers that meander through valleys until they gather in shallow lakebeds and marshes or simply dry up in the desert sun. It is a region that’s defining feature is that of isolation.
The most important attribute of the Great Basin, and one that sets it apart from much of the greater North American Landscape, is the sheer amount of empty space it contains. This is not the verdant prairie, like the one that stretches eastward from the far side of the Rocky Mountains, but arid high desert punctuated only by sagebrush and the occasional low tree. To those unfamiliar with the land, much of it appears essentially desolate. The hundreds of mountain ranges in the basin running
roughly north-south border an equally large number of valleys, each a seemingly uninhabited streak of brown and grey. This land seems unfit for any human presence, let alone long term habitation. Humans have lived in this region for over 10,000 years , however, adapting to the unique challenges and stark landscape. European settlers in the region have had to adapt as well, but they have done so mainly by intervening in the landscape in an attempt to make it more familiar, or at least more comprehensible.
In The Void, the Grid & the Sign: Traversing the Great Basin, author William L. Fox suggests that we perceive this region as an empty “void”, due to its lack of the traditional markers of scale and distance that help us to orient ourselves within a landscape. Fox writes that “The Great Basin is a place where our eyes have trouble getting a grip, no matter how many numbers we throw around trying to quantify it. [ . . . ] We can’t fully see it, thus fail to perceive it correctly, and end up fatally misunderstanding its nature [ . . . ]” Fox also states that “The Basin remains anomalous and contradictory. It contains the lowest and hottest places in the country, but is home to more mountain ranges per square mile than anywhere on earth, save Afghanistan.”
This harsh and unforgiving void that we perceive within the Great Basin is so overwhelming that our natural impulse is to superimpose meaning over it in a “grid” of cartographies, anchoring ourselves to man-made structures like highways and telephone poles. Our road system and the maps that guide us through them shape our experience of this region into one that we can more easily understand, without confronting its alien nature. We take comfort in the familiar and repetitive artifacts of human habitation within a place that we’ve ruled uninhabitable. The Great Basin is the “American frontier of cognitive dissonance”.
The Great Basin’s harsh landscape and unique place in the American consciousness has influenced the work of many artists, promoting a regional obsession with open space, the materiality of the land, and evidence of human action upon the land. Michael Light, an artist whose focus is in aerial photography, has been a key player in my understanding of how the orderly grid of human intervention exists within the seemingly incomprehensible western landscape. Photography is more associated with the American West than any other artistic medium, the photographic process having developed at the same time as a major uptick in western exploration and expansion in the mid-19th century. Photography has therefore been used to cement images of the West into the minds of several generations of Americans, from the first miners and settlers to the transplants of the present day.
Light’s large-scale, black and white photographs trace human intervention over a broad portion of the Great Basin and Mojave Desert as well as the city of Los Angeles. Flying a tiny two-seater CTSW light-sport airplane over great swaths of desert, Light focuses on highway systems and large-scale mining operations in Nevada and Utah as he shoots photographs out of the open cabin door. He contrasts the large scale of these interventions with the impossibly vast scale of the landscape itself, exploring ideas of distance and scale that can only be made visible through aerial photography. Approaching cartography through a godlike view from his camera, Light avoids creating identifiable maps out of his photographs by aiming his lens at and just below the horizon. Light “decouples them from frames of reference by shooting into the sun, eliminating clues about size and scale,” allowing the long shadows of early morning and late afternoon to cover much of the frame.
The artist that is possibly the most associated with this region is Michael Heizer, a land-artist and sculptor who lives and works on an isolated ranch in Central Nevada. Along with Robert Smithson and Walter de Maria, Heizer is considered a founder of Land Art as a movement in the late 1960’s. His first major work, 1969’s Double Negative, was a large-scale excavation in Southern Nevada. Carving a trench 30 feet wide by 50 feet deep over 1500 feet long into the sandstone and rhyolite on either side of a small canyon in Mormon Mesa, Heizer created a piece that was defined by the negative space left behind by the removal of material. His works in the field of land art have continued to play with this displacement and replacement of mass, from pits dug into the ground with boulders placed within them, like in his Nine Nevada Depressions, to his ongoing monumental sculptural project City near his ranch.
While the works of Light and Heizer do not bear any strong aesthetic connections to my own works, both artists have influenced my perception of this region’s landscape and my thoughts on place as it relates to man’s intervention. Light’s documentation of the monumentality of mankind’s endeavors in the West, paired with Heizer’s own monumental excavations and constructions, clarify a regional obsession with vast spaces that have the potential to act as blank canvases, allowing our whims to be writ large upon the land itself. Light show the results of large-scale change, while Heizer abstracts those changes into his immense concrete structures and massive displacements of earth. The contextualization of this idea of malleable space, and the way that the long-term modification of the region has affected those who live here, is a concept that I have continuously explored within my own practice.
Image I - Michael Light, Earth's Largest Excavation, 2.5 Miles Wide and .5 Miles Deep, Looking West, 2006.
Image II - Michael Heizer, Double
Negative (detail), 1969. Fox, Mapping the
Empty: Eight Artists in Nevada,
108.
