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: Politics, Art

208 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 15, 2014

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.