Spiral Jetta
A Road Trip Through the Land Art of the American West
Hogan, Erin
Hardcover
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BOOK SYNOPSIS
Erin Hogan hit the road in her Volkswagen Jetta and headed west from Chicago in search of the monuments of American land art: a salty coil of rocks, four hundred stainless-steel poles, a gash in a mesa, four concrete tubes, and military sheds filled with cubes. Her journey took her through the states of Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. It also took her through the states of anxiety, drunkenness, disorientation, and heat exhaustion. Spiral Jetta is a chronicle of this journey.
A lapsed art historian and devoted urbanite, Hogan initially sought firsthand experience of the monumental earthworks of the 1970s and the 1980sRobert Smithsons Spiral Jetty, Nancy Holts Sun Tunnels, Walter De Marias Lightning Field, James Turrells Roden Crater, Michael Heizers Double Negative, and the contemporary art mecca of Marfa, Texas. Armed with spotty directions, no compass, and less-than-desert-appropriate clothing, she found most of what she was looking for and then some. Her encounters with these artworks are recorded here, personal observations lightly draped in art history and theory. But for Hogan this trip was also the most extended time she had spent alone, and her 3,000-mile circuit through the west became an experiment in solitude, with mixed results.
Spiral Jetta offers a view of a critical moment of twentieth-century American art. It also offers a view of the American landscape, seen through the windshield of a car streaming through the empty highways of the American West, piloted by a woman who had no real idea where she was going.
AUTHOR BIO
Erin Hogan is director of public affairs at the Art Institute of Chicago.
BOOK REVIEWS
“Across this marvelously unexpected little road saga, the stud muffin cowboys of late twentieth century American art at long last meet their sly gamine match. Pretty much doing for Land Art what Geoff Dyer did for D. H. Lawrence, Ms. Hogan, an urban fish decidedly out of water, flopping about in the high desert parch, makes for marvelously endearing company. An at times harrowingly (albeit comically) unreliable navigator (who doesn''t bring a compass along on solo treks across such vast empty expanses?), Hogan nevertheless then manages to deploy an expertly modulated prose, tracking the heaviest of subjects with the lightest of touches, melding gravitas and whimsy (vodka and tonic), in a narrative that in the end, like the art it surveys, manages to be about what it is to be an individual alone—pinprick-contingent, achingly vulnerable, gobsmacked enthralled—in the face of all that is.”—Lawrence Weschler
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MORE BOOK INFO
ISBN: 0226348458
ISBN(13-digit): 9780226348452
Dewey Decimal: 709.78
Library of Congress: 2007049900
Book Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr
Language: ENG
No. of Pages: 180
