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The Void, The Grid & The Sign: Traversing The Great Basin
This is a story that few know, but those who do are its disciples. The story, of the highest and driest of all American deserts, the Great Basin, has no finer voice than that of William Fox. Fox’s book is divided into the three sections of the title. In “The Void,” he leads us through the Great Basin landscape, investigating our visual response to it—a pattern of mountains and valleys on a scale of such magnitude and emptiness and undifferentiated by shape, form, and color that the visual and cognitive expectations of the human mind are confounded and impaired. “The Grid” leads us on a journey through the evolution of cartography in the nineteenth century and the explorations of John Charles Frémont to the net of maps, section markers, railroads, telegraph lines, and highways that humans have thrown across the void throughout history. “The Sign” wends us through the metaphors and language we continue to place around and over the void, revealing the Great Basin as a palimpsest where, for example, the neon boulevards of Las Vegas interplay with ancient petroglyphs. In this one-of-a-kind travel book that allows us to travel within our own neurophysiological processes as well as out into the arresting void of the Great Basin, Fox has created a dazzling new standard at the frontier of writing about the American West. His stunning and broad insight draws from the fields of natural history, cognitive psychology, art history, western history, archaeology, and anthropology, and will be of value to scholars and readers in all these subjects.
240 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 14, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 23, 2015
Well written, inspiring, and thought provoking, this book is one of the best book I have read about how we understand and navigate the land and how we translate that experience in art and narrative. I am traveling across the Great Basin in a couple of months and looking forward to my own first hand experience and translation.
February 24, 2021
I bought this book wanting a good read on the Great Basin Desert, hopefully covering some of the natural and human history of the place. While I learned a few things about the Great Basin (in this book pretty much mainly about the Great Basin in Nevada) and parts of the book were indeed some very decent travel essay writing on the Great Basin, the author describing the terrain, fauna, flora, small towns, weather, he saw and with lots of essays covering a variety of topics from settler trails to nuclear testing to Area 51 to attempts to break the land speed record with the world’s fastest cars to the massive lakes that once dominated the region in the Pleistocene to the history of government surveys of the Great Basin to the search for the mythical and nonexistent Rio Buenaventura, the book really wasn’t primarily a travel essay/human history/natural history of the Great Basin.
I would say about a quarter of the book or so was the author’s visit with and coverage of artist Michael Heizer, an artist who works on sculptures so big that they are essentially reshaping the land itself, creating artwork that could be best compared to the largest of megalithic or earthwork structures like Cahokia or the Great Pyramids, massive sculptures requiring bulldozers and other construction equipment to build and filling decent chunks of one valley. The author spent time discussing Heizer’s art with the artist, visiting his massive sculptures, and then traveling some of the surrounding countryside to see various things with the artist and others.
About half the book is devoted to a considerable amount of coverage of the author’s travels with renowned rock art expert Alvin McLane (both petroglyphs and pictographs, the former involving some sort of carving or incision into the rock, the latter not). Author William L. Fox described in travel essay detail visiting a large number of rock art sites in Nevada, some well-known to Alvin, others newly discovered sites (or discovered while out in the field with the author). Along the way so to speak (the author’s writing style was often to describe an action, have an interlude on some topic, and then go back to the action, perhaps having another interlude if say Alvin was still surveying a site and the author was waiting for him to finish) the author would discuss the history of the study of rock art, who produced rock art and why, and most of all what people think It All Means (with widely varying theories noted, including basically a popular We Can Never Know).
Both sections were interesting, though I didn’t always grasp what artist Michael Heizer was doing with his massive artworks like _City_ and _Complex One_ nor did I quite understand some of what he told the author. In both cases – though the author provided some really good descriptions – I can’t but help think photographs would have been absolutely amazing. There are none in the book. Though the author noted that Heizer didn’t allow photographs, at least at the time of writing, in the section on rock art Alvin McLane is mentioned taking photographs many times. Just a few would have been nice. Also the sections on rock art, while again interesting, may have overstayed their welcome just a bit in comparison to other topics that could have been covered.
A good chunk of the book is on topics that the author went back to multiple times, his discussion of the concept of the void, the grid, and signs and especially how they relate to the Great Basin desert. The title of the book really did relate to some of the core concepts of what Fox was discussing in the book and it took me a bit to realize those were central points (though that may have been some density on my part).
The void aspect refers to the desert itself, how humanity (at least Western civilization) views the Great Basin, a region with “few easily discernable landmarks and is thus a topography where few if any memories accumulate.” It was “a region in which you could lose track of all time and distance, not to mention yourself.” Fox discussed how difficult it is to even look at in some ways (with say little in the way of intervening landmarks and unusually clear air, making mountains many miles away appear a lot closer to the viewer than they actually were, or objects in the foreground, such as a lone tree, hard to judge in size; the desert “lacks the natural features or built structures that allow us to focus on that part of the landscape where normally our vision, hence our imagination, spends most of its time,” creating a cognitive dissonance). Also the desert, the void, while “not a blank slate,” was “empty enough…that we’re prone to transform it in our imagination into a literal void that happily receives our mythic inventions, which range from the Virginian and the Lone Ranger to the space operas that have evolved from these stories, such as _Star Wars_.” Compared to the surrounding countryside, particularly in the 19th century, the Great Basin really was a void on the map, unknown and almost unknowable (given how difficult it is to make a living in the Great Basin and thus lacking in settlers who could truly get to know a place).
The grid (“that seductive geometric meme”) in contrast is basically Western civilization’s (American but not Native American, at least originally) attempt to measure and control the void, or to guide people through the void to other places (“The grid abhors a void”). A concept Fox spent a good deal of time on, he ranged pretty widely in various asides on the idea of imposing order on the universe, of humanity coming to terms with the idea that the universe was “a measurable entity,” his discussion ranging from the time of the ancient Greeks such as Pythagoras to Thomas Jefferson (who “conceived of the idea of the grid in order to promulgate democracy across the North American continent by making available equal measures of land”) to explorers and surveyors such as Jedediah Smith, John C. Fremont, and Charles Preuss to modern maps put out by the BLM and others to GPS. The author delved into the history of cartography, the use of grids not just in the Great Basin but elsewhere, and what grids really mean intellectually to humanity.
Not a bad discussion, I was slow to warm to it but after I understand where the author was going I found it interesting:
“The primary way we handle the void – how we physically and imaginatively manipulate it so we can travel safely through it to the other side – is to impose the most basic of all rectilinear geometries upon it, from petroglyphs to highway signs.”
He cautioned though that the grid, that maps, can become quite an abstraction, and that “an intimate relationship with land…becomes very tortuous when we abstract ourselves from where we live.” That one should be aware that the “grid simply ran over reality with its obsessive mathematics.” For example, noted explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell advocated for what the author called “an organic pattern of settlement,” not tied to a Jeffersonian grid so prevalent in the eastern United States, one dictated by watersheds and available potable water. His recommendations were ignored, as they were “in direct opposition to both the geographical and the intellectual expansionism of the century – complementary developments founded upon the use of rectilinear measurements overlaid upon nature.”
Not a bad book, I thought a few of the asides were a bit dry at times and the author got lost a little bit in the weeds in talking about issues relating to ancient Greek philosophers or early man though they were well written and easy to follow. The travel essay parts were good, definitely good coverage of Native American rock art, there was some interesting sections on Burning Man, Area 51, Great Basin botany, and Andy Green’s breaking of the sound barrier in his quest for the world land-speed record. When he wasn’t being philosophical or discussing the void, the grid, and the sign (or on one of his many asides) the travel essay writing could be quite vivid and engaging. Really nice bibliography at the end with comments on many of the works he listed, though the book lacks an index.
I would say about a quarter of the book or so was the author’s visit with and coverage of artist Michael Heizer, an artist who works on sculptures so big that they are essentially reshaping the land itself, creating artwork that could be best compared to the largest of megalithic or earthwork structures like Cahokia or the Great Pyramids, massive sculptures requiring bulldozers and other construction equipment to build and filling decent chunks of one valley. The author spent time discussing Heizer’s art with the artist, visiting his massive sculptures, and then traveling some of the surrounding countryside to see various things with the artist and others.
About half the book is devoted to a considerable amount of coverage of the author’s travels with renowned rock art expert Alvin McLane (both petroglyphs and pictographs, the former involving some sort of carving or incision into the rock, the latter not). Author William L. Fox described in travel essay detail visiting a large number of rock art sites in Nevada, some well-known to Alvin, others newly discovered sites (or discovered while out in the field with the author). Along the way so to speak (the author’s writing style was often to describe an action, have an interlude on some topic, and then go back to the action, perhaps having another interlude if say Alvin was still surveying a site and the author was waiting for him to finish) the author would discuss the history of the study of rock art, who produced rock art and why, and most of all what people think It All Means (with widely varying theories noted, including basically a popular We Can Never Know).
Both sections were interesting, though I didn’t always grasp what artist Michael Heizer was doing with his massive artworks like _City_ and _Complex One_ nor did I quite understand some of what he told the author. In both cases – though the author provided some really good descriptions – I can’t but help think photographs would have been absolutely amazing. There are none in the book. Though the author noted that Heizer didn’t allow photographs, at least at the time of writing, in the section on rock art Alvin McLane is mentioned taking photographs many times. Just a few would have been nice. Also the sections on rock art, while again interesting, may have overstayed their welcome just a bit in comparison to other topics that could have been covered.
A good chunk of the book is on topics that the author went back to multiple times, his discussion of the concept of the void, the grid, and signs and especially how they relate to the Great Basin desert. The title of the book really did relate to some of the core concepts of what Fox was discussing in the book and it took me a bit to realize those were central points (though that may have been some density on my part).
The void aspect refers to the desert itself, how humanity (at least Western civilization) views the Great Basin, a region with “few easily discernable landmarks and is thus a topography where few if any memories accumulate.” It was “a region in which you could lose track of all time and distance, not to mention yourself.” Fox discussed how difficult it is to even look at in some ways (with say little in the way of intervening landmarks and unusually clear air, making mountains many miles away appear a lot closer to the viewer than they actually were, or objects in the foreground, such as a lone tree, hard to judge in size; the desert “lacks the natural features or built structures that allow us to focus on that part of the landscape where normally our vision, hence our imagination, spends most of its time,” creating a cognitive dissonance). Also the desert, the void, while “not a blank slate,” was “empty enough…that we’re prone to transform it in our imagination into a literal void that happily receives our mythic inventions, which range from the Virginian and the Lone Ranger to the space operas that have evolved from these stories, such as _Star Wars_.” Compared to the surrounding countryside, particularly in the 19th century, the Great Basin really was a void on the map, unknown and almost unknowable (given how difficult it is to make a living in the Great Basin and thus lacking in settlers who could truly get to know a place).
The grid (“that seductive geometric meme”) in contrast is basically Western civilization’s (American but not Native American, at least originally) attempt to measure and control the void, or to guide people through the void to other places (“The grid abhors a void”). A concept Fox spent a good deal of time on, he ranged pretty widely in various asides on the idea of imposing order on the universe, of humanity coming to terms with the idea that the universe was “a measurable entity,” his discussion ranging from the time of the ancient Greeks such as Pythagoras to Thomas Jefferson (who “conceived of the idea of the grid in order to promulgate democracy across the North American continent by making available equal measures of land”) to explorers and surveyors such as Jedediah Smith, John C. Fremont, and Charles Preuss to modern maps put out by the BLM and others to GPS. The author delved into the history of cartography, the use of grids not just in the Great Basin but elsewhere, and what grids really mean intellectually to humanity.
Not a bad discussion, I was slow to warm to it but after I understand where the author was going I found it interesting:
“The primary way we handle the void – how we physically and imaginatively manipulate it so we can travel safely through it to the other side – is to impose the most basic of all rectilinear geometries upon it, from petroglyphs to highway signs.”
He cautioned though that the grid, that maps, can become quite an abstraction, and that “an intimate relationship with land…becomes very tortuous when we abstract ourselves from where we live.” That one should be aware that the “grid simply ran over reality with its obsessive mathematics.” For example, noted explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell advocated for what the author called “an organic pattern of settlement,” not tied to a Jeffersonian grid so prevalent in the eastern United States, one dictated by watersheds and available potable water. His recommendations were ignored, as they were “in direct opposition to both the geographical and the intellectual expansionism of the century – complementary developments founded upon the use of rectilinear measurements overlaid upon nature.”
Not a bad book, I thought a few of the asides were a bit dry at times and the author got lost a little bit in the weeds in talking about issues relating to ancient Greek philosophers or early man though they were well written and easy to follow. The travel essay parts were good, definitely good coverage of Native American rock art, there was some interesting sections on Burning Man, Area 51, Great Basin botany, and Andy Green’s breaking of the sound barrier in his quest for the world land-speed record. When he wasn’t being philosophical or discussing the void, the grid, and the sign (or on one of his many asides) the travel essay writing could be quite vivid and engaging. Really nice bibliography at the end with comments on many of the works he listed, though the book lacks an index.
November 22, 2018
I enjoyed all the Great Basin traverses described herein. Despite growing up next door to the Great Basin, I have not traveled it much. Now I hope to one day travel to see Michael Hezier's City and the Black Rock Desert, among others. And if camping, I will remember to zip up my tent to keep out black widows. The author's thoughts on void and desert go well together especially here.
I appreciate that the author described scenes involving U.S. military test plane flights, Burning Man, searching for rock art, driving through sandstorms, and watching preparations for land-speed contents all with the same level of normalcy. That's just how life is in the desert. I was less interested in the recounting of historical explorations, and the search for rock art in the last section became a little tiresome.
I appreciate that the author described scenes involving U.S. military test plane flights, Burning Man, searching for rock art, driving through sandstorms, and watching preparations for land-speed contents all with the same level of normalcy. That's just how life is in the desert. I was less interested in the recounting of historical explorations, and the search for rock art in the last section became a little tiresome.
April 16, 2014
Unusual book. Would benefit from photos of The City (Heizer). Details of the Nevada desert ring true. Tension between desert at empty wasteland vs. restorative wilderness.
"So desperate are we to maintain a connection to the myth of frontier, that uncorrupted state of mind where we still have a chance to heroically reestablish ourselves in a garden without sin....." Compare this to the desire for "pristine" open spaces to explore and the chance of making our fortune on the frontier, leaving behind all the failure and misfit in old society.
"So desperate are we to maintain a connection to the myth of frontier, that uncorrupted state of mind where we still have a chance to heroically reestablish ourselves in a garden without sin....." Compare this to the desire for "pristine" open spaces to explore and the chance of making our fortune on the frontier, leaving behind all the failure and misfit in old society.
June 2, 2024
I thought it was difficult to follow the narrative descriptions I realize he wanted to make the artist’s project location vague, but make everything vague in the process. I guess if I cared more about the author, as a person, I could follow more of his pontifications.
Read
August 23, 2009Still struggling with this early Michael Heizer quote but read on I must: "I'm not here because the mountains are pretty. But because it has the materials I need, the rock and gravel and sand." p. 16. I question for the moment whether he is worthy of my approval but I shall continue to give him a chance...
I will give Fox an early nod though.
I will give Fox an early nod though.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews