- Fifty million cubic yards of earth were moved to sculpt Seattle as we know it.
Earlier this year, Jen Graves got a grant from the Warhol Foundation and Creative Capital to travel the country looking at the great works of land art. "Most American land art was built in the 1970s and sits regally in the remote deserts of the Southwest," she writes in The Stranger this week. "The art is intense but the stakes are low, like a highly contagious person in the middle of nowhere."
Seattle itself—the city under your feet—is one of the most outrageous land sculptures in American history. In spite of what you're told about how "pristine" and "natural" the city is, it is in fact extremely artificial. Seattle artists think differently about the land than other artists, Graves argues, because Seattle has a different relationship with the land than other cities do. In making this argument, she does battle with Walter De Maria's famous statement that "isolation is the essence of land art," and visits De Maria's The Lightning Field out in New Mexico...
- Walter De Maria's "The Lightning Field"
And she touches on the work SuttonBeresCuller is doing in Georgetown, turning an abandoned 1930s gas station into a city park complete with a fake grassy hill, comparing it to the fake neighborhood Boeing created to hide the factory where bombers were made during World War II...
- Models pose in the fake neighborhood set on top of Boeing's bomber factory—check out those "trees."
She also discusses Elise Richman's paintings (like little hills jutting into a room), the artists Susan Robb and Stokley Towles (who walked from Seattle to Snoqualmie Falls with 40 other people this summer), Jerry Garcia (who wanted to create a city park in Denny Regrade reminiscent of the "spite mounds" that appeared during the original regrades, when certain property owners refused to go along and watched as their plots were stranded in midair), the Robert Morris earthwork in South King County that nearby residents think is a dog park, the totem pole in Pioneer Square that businessmen in 1899 stole from Alaska (local native tribes do not make totem poles), and Lead Pencil Studio's recent non-billboard called Non-Sign...
- Welded metal bits around where a billboard would go, a reminder that emptiness—isolation—is a construction, too.
It's a fascinating argument, and a great read, and it'll change the way you think about this place you're in, this sculpture you're on.
