The fact that lightning so rarely appears does not detract from the intended purpose and effect of a place that is helpfully understood in Heideggerian terms. Seeking to explain the relationship of man-made objects to the surrounding landscape in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ Heidegger writes that a bridge ‘does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge expressly causes them to lie across from each other.’ From this it follows that the bridge effectively brings or leads the stream to flow under it and between these banks. ‘The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream. Thus it guides and attends the stream through the meadows.’
The tail wags the dog in similar and, for our purposes, more explicit fashion in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’ where Heidegger insists that a temple standing on rocky ground draws up out of the rock its ‘bulky yet spontaneous support.’ Furthermore, the building does not just hold its ground against the storm raging around it but ‘first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence.’ And not only that: ‘The lustre and gleam of the stone, though itself apparently glowing only by the grace of the sun, first brings to radiance the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of the night. The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air.’ [My italics.]
Notwithstanding this extraordinary sense of cause-generating effect, over the years voices have occasionally dissented from the consensually reverent view of De Maria’s achievement. The Dia Art Foundation (which administers the site) controls access to The Lightning Field and which photographs of it can appear in print. You can’t just drop in, take a quick look and drive off. You have to stay the night, and since the cabin accommodates only six people, you have to book well in advance. Taking aim at these ‘authoritarian’ measures in a briefly notorious essay, a critic named John Beardsley claimed that the build-up helped ‘insure that one will fully expect to see God at the Lightning Field. Needless to say, He doesn’t appear. No artwork could live up to this hype.’
Except it could and it does. Even without the bonus of lightning, the experience of The Lightning Field transcends its reputation. Of course god does not appear. There’s a lot of space but, even as a figure of speech, there’s no room for god. The Lightning Field offers an intensity of experience that for a long time could be articulated only — or most conveniently — within the language of religion. Faced with huge experiences, we have a tendency to fall to our knees, because it’s a well-rehearsed expression of awe. Nothing about The Lightning Field prompts one to genuflect in this way. Considering some archaeological sites, Lewis Mumford concluded, quite reasonably, ‘It is only for their gods that men exert themselves so extravagantly.’ The Lightning Field represents an absolute refutation or, more precisely, the expiration of that claim — unless art has now become a god. Rigorously atheistic, geometrically neutral, it takes the faith and vaulting promise of modernism into the wilderness. Part of the experience of coming here is the attempt to understand and articulate one’s responses to the experience.
Also, contrary to Beardsley’s griping, access is arranged in such a way as to maximise this experience. You leave your cars at Quemado and are taken up, in a group, at two-thirty in the afternoon. The drive takes half an hour, so you arrive at the least impressive time of the day. As we approached, a groan of disappointment swept through our party: we didn’t know exactly what we were expecting but we expected more. More what? More something. And then, gradually, you get it. You realize that this is not a piece of art to be seen but — the point bears repeating — an experience of space that unfolds over time.
This is one of the reasons why The Lightning Field is almost unphotographable. It is too spread out — and it takes too long. Everyone sees the same picture — the one on the cover of Robert Hughes’s American Visions—of a lightning storm dancing round the poles. That is what might be called the Lightning Field moment. Lightning may be rare in actuality, but it is right that The Lightning Field should be represented in this way. Every other attempt to reduce it to an image, a moment, sells it short.
Within the agreed limits of your visit — you’re taken up there and brought back — you can do whatever you like. Few religious sites permit such freedom of behaviour and response. You can drop acid. You can run around naked. You can drink a ton of beer and watch your woman pole-dance. You can sit on the porch reading about the Spiral Jetty. You can chant. You can chat with your friends. You can listen to music on your iPod, or you can just stand there with your hands in your pockets, shivering, wishing you’d brought gloves and a scarf. And then you have to leave.
We were picked up at eleven o’clock and driven back to Quemado. In a couple of hours the next bunch of pilgrims would be taken up there. If it hadn’t been for them — if it hadn’t been booked — we would all have stayed another night, for a week, for the whole summer.
As it was, we ate cherry pie in the El Sarape café and took some pictures to prove we’d all been here together. There’s a dusty Ping-Pong table in the otherwise deserted Dia office. Ethan and I played a couple of games before we all headed out of town.
4
Thinking about places like the Hump, the Devil’s Chimney, The Lightning Field (or, for that matter, sites such as Angkor Wat or Borobudur), I keep coming back to the painting that I saw in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on the day I’d hoped to see Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Elihu Vedder’s The Questioner of the Sphinx (1863) shows a dark-skinned wanderer or traveller, ear pressed against the head of the sphinx that emerges from the sea of sand in which it has been submerged for centuries. Apart from a few broken columns and a human skull (an earlier questioner?), nothing besides remains. In a way it’s an early depiction of the post-apocalyptic world (the sky is black but it doesn’t seem like night), a reminder, painted in the midst of the American Civil War, that plenty of civilizations before our own have suffered apocalyptic extinction. One could easily imagine that it’s not the head of the sphinx poking above the sand but the torch of the Statue of Liberty, Planet of the Apes—style. Vedder was in his twenties when he did this painting. He had not been to Egypt but had seen illustrations of the Sphinx at Gizeh. His painting seems emblematic of the experiences that crop up repeatedly in this book: of trying to work out what a certain place — a certain way of marking the landscape — means; what it’s trying to tell us; what we go to it for.
Time in Space
Maybe it is not the natives of Texas or Arizona who fully appreciate the scale of the places where they have grown up. Perhaps you have to be British, to come from ‘an island no bigger than a back garden’—in Lawrence’s contemptuous phrase — to grasp properly the immensity of the American West. So it’s not surprising that Lawrence considered New Mexico ‘the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had.’