This is one way in which landscape is political—it shapes its people. It tells them stories about themselves, and plenty of people move to certain places because they want the place's story to be their story. Plenty of people move to Seattle in order to go hiking and kayaking and to grow vegetables. But what I like best about this place is that the nature is all tied up with artifice that you can't actually see. Artists here see it.
In this week's feature about land, art, and urbanness, This Land Is False Land, I find myself noticing the economics of The Lightning Field in New Mexico, resisting descending into a pit of abstraction in the Mormon Mesa in Nevada, and imagining a city park 60 feet in the air in downtown Seattle.
There was only so much I could pack into one story. So I'm going to post other artworks, experiences, and pictures. Yesterday's ghost viewfinders at Alki were one example. Donald Fels, one of the artists who made those, is also working on a project called Waterlines, in conjunction with the Burke Museum.
Fels has some big ideas for land art projects he'd like to see happen while we're in the process of tearing down the viaduct and remaking the waterfront. From an email he sent me:
Occidental Park in Pioneer Square was once mostly a lagoon. A spring fed fresh water into the lagoon and the spring served as the first drinking water source. It would be swell to take up the cobblestones in the park, dig it out and return it to its muddy suggestive self. ...And Seattle artist Robin Stein has been preoccupied with regrading for a while. In 2008,The Montlake Cut was man-made (by thousands of Chinese laborers, a number of whom didn’t survive the digging). As the Evergreen Bridge gets re-done, why not slice through what was, letting cars drive through the centuries of layers, made visible once again- reengineer the reengineering, cutting through the cut.