Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West

by Lucy R. Lippard

“A marvelous slim book [that] weaves . . . ideas, facts, images, and histories into a whole about . . . the ecology of the manmade world.” ―Rebecca Solnit
 
In Undermining , the award-winning author, art historian and social critic Lucy R. Lippard delivers “another trademark work” that combines text and full-color images to explore “the intersection of art, the environment, geography and politics” ( Kirkus Reviews ).
 
Working from her own experience of life in a New Mexico village, and inspired by the gravel pits in the surrounding landscape, Lippard addresses a number of fascinating themes―including fracking, mining, land art, adobe buildings, ruins, Indian land rights, the Old West, tourism, photography, and water. In her meditations, she illuminates the relationship between culture, industry, and the land. From threatened Native American sacred sites to the history of uranium mining, she offers a skeptical examination of the “subterranean economy.”
 
Featuring more than two hundred gorgeous color images, Undermining offers a provocative new perspective on the relationship between art and place in a rapidly shifting society.
 
“[Lippard’s] strength lies in the depth of [her] commitment―her dual loyalty to tradition and modernity and her effort to restore the broken connection between the two.” ―Suzi Gablik, The New York Times Book Review

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Essays, Politics, Geography, Photography, Environment

208 pages, Paperback

First published August 6, 2013

About the author

Since 1966, Lippard has published 20 books on feminism, art, politics and place and has received numerous awards and accolades from literary critics and art associations. A 2012 exhibition on her seminal book, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object at the Brooklyn Museum, titled "Six Years": Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art", cites Lippard's scholarship as its point of entry into a discussion about conceptual art during its era of emergence, demonstrating her crucial role in the contemporary understanding of this period of art production and criticism. Her research on the move toward dematerialization in art making has formed a cornerstone of contemporary art scholarship and discourse.

Co-founder of Printed matter (an art bookstore in New York City centered around artist's books), the Heresies Collective, Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D), Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, and other artists' organizations, she has also curated over 50 exhibitions, done performances, comics, guerrilla theater, and edited several independent publications the latest of which is the decidedly local La Puente de Galisteo in her home community in Galisteo, New Mexico. She has infused aesthetics with politics, and disdained disinterestedness for ethical activism.

Reviews

[Kai · Rating 5 out of 5]

i bought this book a looong time ago when i was starting my underground project. i paged through it a little bit but didn't find it too revealing, and it seemed a little naive at times. earlier this year however i was speaking with some artists down in houston, and they added some context that i didn't know. Lippard isn't just some random art critic, but basically The Critic of Note of land art in the 70s and 80s. consequently, this book marks a major shift in her thought, and a soft critique of the underlying chauvanism and coloniality of certain versions of land art. instead, Lippard turns to critical aesthetic practices for examining extraction and "land use" decisionmaking in the US West, which she describes as a practice of "cultural geography." She also has both a sympathy for Indigenous critical practice but also an attentiveness to the tough decisions Native Nations make regarding sovereignty, and thus is somewhat perpendicular to the versions of, say, Anthropocene Art that depoliticize extraction and its materials by stripping them from historical context. Lippard's book-length essay, written in 2014, is refreshing for having almost no reference to the Anthropocene context. though it is still a little meandering at times, the essay is on the track of 2010s High Country News, which is a better politic for the US West than most of what has existed prior. The real treat here though is Lippard's curatorial skills, the extensive artistic works that run above the written text, and Lippard's captioned commentary hidden below. Lippard is interested in documentary photography in the style of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, but also collage and assemblage. This is a formidable aesthetic contribution to political ecology which i expect to return to frequently in the future.

[Pat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Packed full both figuratively and literally. The format is too small. The footnotes and captions are mushed together, for the sake of visual format, at the expense of the reader. Too much.

The book is a beautiful little thing with fine examples and photos. But overwhelming. I came away with an overall sense of loss and an alarming conviction that we are destroying our lands. Perversely, there is often beauty in these other worldly interventions. Perhaps this is what draws artists to document these desecrated landscapes.

[Tuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

lippard uses art photographs to talk about capitalist exploitation of the land, resources, air, water, trees, people, minerals of (mostly) western usa. she quotes dorothea lange pg 168:"A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera." and she looks at subhankar banerjee arctic photos, he says he is an activist first, artist second http://www.climatestorytellers.org/ she uses her essays along with these powerful (a bit too small format though for me, you to may need a magnifier) photographs, using hundreds of photos from dozens and dozens of artists/activists, to run through many many many examples of fat cats taking what they want, from wherever, in however a destructive non sustainable manner, for their profit.

a must add for public libraries, i'd say, and super interesting and eclectic for the engaged reader.

has endnotes and biblio, but no index, needs maps too.

[Malrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lucy R. Lippard sheds light on many of the complex issues both globally and locally concerning the use of public land. Throughout the book she uses photographs and pertinent history of the land in the West and its people.

[Shane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lucy Lippard is a well-known voice in the area of land and site-specific art. Undermining repositions this voice to land activism situated particularly in the American west, where she has repositioned herself. Using a mixture of photography and writing, it tells a story of gravel, adobe, uranium, fracking and water, considering what happens in the subterranean realm.

Lippard ppresents strong (and worrying) points about land use and land law, but never really finalises her points. She makes a couple of howlers, spending a long time discussing Western land artists and then paying lip service to native art (which seems more important in this context), or suggesting "truth" in pre-Photoshop photography. The book is also very American-centric, and despite her statement that the local represents the global, her arguments do not hold from a global perspective if you are familiar with art or activism outside of the USA. Despite these issues, there are wonderful poetic moments that contrast erection of buildings with digging holes, and the writing benefits from Lippard's ironic sense of humour and well-judged framing from one section to the next, and in the end is an interesting if flawed exploration of the undermined world.

[atom_box Evan G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slim, portable art + history + all-politics-is-local book.

You can read the captions and pics and feel as though you are moving through the rooms of a cool land art exhibition. Mineral extraction is a major theme. 400 photos and nary a human. File on the same shelf with a DVD of Koyaanisqatsi and Robert Smith Spiral Jetty artbooks.

The cover pic is illustrative of the overlapping resonance in a lot of her curated photos: Are these kivas? Are they coke ovens? (Turns out they are the latter.)

Lucy R. Lippard: "This book is more concerned with land use than with landscape, more focused on what we learn from living in place than what we see when we look out the windows. Land use is a more realistic replacement for the too easily romanticize notion of 'land' and 'earth'."

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

everything about this book is so information-dense it becomes almost illegible. the format of every page being half text and half image/caption made this book sooo genuinely impenetrable to me. writing is tight and fast but often overwhelming - a good starting point but crammed with so many examples that deserve much more elaboration.

[Aaron Bumgarner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Should be required reading for those of us living the Southwest. Lots of ideas beautifully woven together.

[Rae]

Uranium industry. Pit mines. Fracking. Earthwork arts. Subterranean economy.

[Laszlo Hafra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Painfully relevant and important issues, but few original thoughts and plenty of dogmatic repetitions that sold well at the time of publishing that aged quite badly.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think the author needs more practice or slam poetry sessions but she doesn't make me want to take another drink. Targeted information, great photos and proper attribution.

[Zach Whitworth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lippard provides great detail on capitalist exploitation of land, especially the American Southwest—the links made between land and human civilization were eye-opening and informative. Lippard's approach was more focused on socio-political happenings, corporate business dealings, and the activist movements in opposition, but there was an overall lack of discussion when it came to the art. There were footnotes and images that accompanied the text, but the author rarely mentions them, nor does she make more than a general statement about artists working with the subject of land use every so often (aside from multiple mentions of CLUI). The book has a substantial amount of informative content, but it is severely lacking in arts content for being written by such an esteemed arts writer and curator.

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent follow-on to Ana Maria Spagna's 'Reclaimers,' although Lippard's book focuses on how artists attempt to make sense of land use in the American West, and how they document and publicize human outrages against the land. Every page includes a photograph by an artist or of an artist's work in the West. Like Spagna, Lippard spends a lot of time exploring the greedy actions and inadvertent mistakes that have scarred western landscapes, but Lippard's call to action is for artists. "Where devastated landscapes provide fodder for photographic advocacy and raw materials for land art, the next hopeful step--in tandem with progressive land use politics--is a focus on actual recycling, reclamation, or remediation," she writes. "There are hundreds of exhausted sites littering the national landscape, waiting to be made meaningful: unsightly, dangerous quarries and mines, clearcut forests, slag heaps, mine shafts, trampled riparian areas, piles of hazardous waste leaking into our vulnerable waterways, and overgrazed pastures" (176-177). Though she acknowledges that so many of us live in the virtual world, she optiomistically depends on the fact that we reside in the local and the geographical world, and that we'll feel compelled to take care of it, all historical evidence to the contrary.

[Daisy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This feels like a rambling walk through various land use issues that we should all be very concerned about but don't seem to have the time for, using the work of artists who are concerned and do have time to illustrate and illuminate. The work of dozens of these artists and writers is shown and cited, many of whom are creating truly interesting work, and it's worth it to read/look at just for that. The focus is on western problems but there's nothing here that doesn't concern pretty much everyone in one way or another (or sooner or later), from mining to nuclear waste storage to water rights. The entanglements of Native American advocacy that complicates some of these problems is something us east coast residents aren't as aware of (though I know of a couple really fascinating local cases), but it's still interesting to read about. It's worth getting to the end of the book for her eloquent assessment of current attitudes towards ecological disaster and call to arms to artists.

[Chelsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A slender but incredibly deep book that packs in seemingly everything that's currently on the brilliant Lucy Leppard's mind. It starts with gravel, and from there opens up to encompass land art, other art, adobe construction, New Mexico architecture, water rights, mining, indigenous land use past and present, nuclear waste storage, fracking, transportation, and more art, art, art. It's a beautiful book, too, the top third of each page occupied by full-color images and the rest a long-running essay broken into sections but not chapters. I don't know how a book can contain so many ideas and yet feel so crystalline and coherent. I devoured every word (and image) and every time I step outside I think of something Lippard wrote in this mighty book.

[Mills College Library]

701.03097 L765 2013