The Lightning Field

by Kenneth Baker, Lynne Cooke (Preface)

Walter De Maria's Lightning Field (1977) is one of the 20th century's most significant works of art. Situated in a remote area of desert in southwestern New Mexico, it comprises 400 polished, stainless-steel poles (spaced 220 feet apart) installed in a grid measuring one mile by one kilometer. A sculpture to be explored on foot, The Lightning Field is intended to be experienced over an extended period of time.  

 

Critic Kenneth Baker visited The Lightning Field numerous times over the course of the past 30 years in order to write this text. Inspired and challenged by this remarkable artwork, Baker speculates on the course of our contemporary human condition. But, rather than building on ideas in narrative sequence, he deploys quotation to effect multiple perspectives and points of view. Baker's citations and elegantly crafted prose are arrayed––in a metaphorical parallel to De Maria's choreographing of the vast landscape of the American Southwest––to create a compelling text.  

160 pages, Hardcover

First published July 28, 2008

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a better book on an earth work than the previous book I read (Spiral Jetta), though at times, the writing was a bit rich and arch; maybe I just didn't like the writer's voice, which at times tried a little too hard to ponder the imponderable. The book consists of a foreword/introduction and then two essays on the Lightning Field: one written in the late 70s after the work was finished and then a second essay chronicling the critic's several returns to the work between 1994 and 2007. And I very much appreciated such a structure, but I just didn't like the writer's voice. The writing consisted of a lot quotations, seemingly to the point that Baker would seem to just stream into another writer's words. (I must admit to liking a textural feature in which, instead of using the usual quotation symbols, the text simply used a different tint and font to the text when a quotation occurred. But this might be more the work of the editor or publisher than Baker's doing.) And he also seemed to reference the military industrial complex a lot, suggesting that the Lightning Field was connected to it/inspired by it/emblematic-critical of it/evocative of it/etc. A final annoyance was the author's reference of September 11th in the foreword/introduction, as if he had to get his two cents in and connect this work to that incident.