Marjorie Barrick Museum Podcast

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You're listening to locally produced programming created in KUNV Studios on public radio. KUNV 91.5.

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Hello, my name is Leanne Huddleston and I am the manager of community engagement and outreach.

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I'm Deanne and I am the communications specialist.

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We're here today to talk about the Modern Desert Markings and Homage to Las Vegas Land Art Exhibition, presented and created in partnership with the Nevadans for Cultural Preservation, on view at the Baruch Museum of Art until July 8th. After an open call and of the 70 applications received, 10 artists were selected to provide contemporary perspectives on five historic land art works located in the deserts of Southern Nevada. Through a variety of media, these artists provide critical perspectives to address related issues such as land ownership, desert ecology, and tourism. Modern Desert Markings is a group exhibition curated by Katie Hoffman and Hikmet Sidney Lowe. We're joined today by our curators. Would you two like to say hello and introduce

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yourself? Sure, hi, this is Katie Hoffman, the President of Nevadans for Cultural Preservation and also a co-curator of Modern Desert Markings. And this is Hikmit Sidney Lowe, the other co-curator with Katie of Modern Desert Markings. I also teach as a part-time instructor at UNLV in Art History.

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Wonderful. Thank you, too, for introducing yourselves and to kind of get kicked off. Let's start from the very beginning. Can you speak about the process of the exhibition, how it came to be? How did this how did this all come together? Well, the I this is Katie, I guess I'm

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responsible for the origin of this project. So I can speak to that a little bit. It actually started when I was taking a land art course from Hickman at UNLV. And as I learned about some pieces in the Nevada deserts, I realized that they were over 50 years old and therefore qualified in certain ways for historic preservation guidelines to be applied to them. And also that they were on public lands. And so that people were able to recreate and essentially use the land around and

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in, around, and on top of these art pieces, potentially without knowing there was ever

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something done there in the past.

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So, the exhibition really started by wanting to address those issues. And I was, this is Hikmet, and I was so happy that after the Land Art course that we experienced together, that Katie really wanted to take some of the ideas that we had talked about in the class and her knowledge, her professional knowledge, and work with these sites and look at Nevada as a state has the most works of these sort of historic works of land art in the country. And to be able to sort of hone in on the five works that were done around Las Vegas from 1962 to 1970 was a really enticing idea and that idea was Katie's. It was a great idea.

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That's really exciting. Thank you. Could either of you describe some of those land art works? Like when you say a land art work that people can perhaps recreate on, do things on, what do you mean? What are we physically talking about?

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Well, Hikmet, would you like to briefly introduce us to the land art of that period? Sure, sure, I'm happy to do that. So, through Katie's research and working for a while with the Nevada Museum of Art that has an interest in land art, She determined, and then we started to investigate the five works done around Las Vegas. So, starting in 1962, we have a work called Studies of the End of the World No. 2, which was done by the Swiss artist, Jean Tinguely. He had his partner and fellow artist, Niki de Saint Paul, and what they were interested in doing was there was an invitation for them to come to Nevada and they ended up in a very brief nutshell gathering materials and refuse from Las Vegas sort of testing it all out then putting it out on the gene dry like playa and blowing it up and it was in a reaction, sort of a critical look at the Geneva Disarmament Convention of 1962 that was taking place. So we go from 1962 with Study for the End of the World, and then we have Las Vegas Peace that was done by Walter DeMaria, and that was done northwest of Las Vegas, and it was done with Michael Heiser. Michael Heiser has a long history of working in Nevada, and so Heiser and Di Maria were together as Di Maria did his piece. And then interestingly, the other three pieces are by Michael Heiser. The one that probably is most famous is double negative that is on the escarpment of the Mormon playa, and that is still sort of accessible and visible, even though it's in a fairly ruinous, beautiful state. And the other two works that Heizer did were, again, at Gene Dry Lake. One of them was Rift One, that was done in 1968, where he worked with other artists and created sort of a zigzag of removed dirt on the playa. And then the other work that he did there has a longer title. It is Circular Surface Planar Displacement of 1970. We found a great quote by Heiser where he talked about maybe he didn't have as many friends as he assumed everybody else had, but he did have his motorcycles. And so he worked with some folks and took his motorcycle out onto the playa and basically created these circular drawings on the landscape. And Katie, you've got more information on the folks that he was actually with when he was doing that, if you wanted to talk about that. Oh, it's true, and actually a lot of these land art sites were scouted by the same group of artists and their same patron who was Guido D'Aero, a pilot and a patron of the arts who would literally use his plane to fly Michael Heiser around pointing out lands that he might And then even in the case of the circular surface displacement, planar, sorry, planar displacement drawing, he was photographing and actively partaking in the earthwork. He also applied for and secured the surface rights so that Michael Heiser could work on the playa for that year. So the same scout was also responsible for scouting DeMaria's piece out where it was located. And also the more recent location of Hugo Rondinone's Seven Magic Mountains. That was a great patron for Las Vegas Arts. But back to speaking to your original question, how could one be recreating on top of these art sites? As Hikmet mentioned, all but one of these sites was created or was performed and then as such was ephemeral and there's not really a lot of evidence of these art happenings left on the landscape. The works that were performed at Gene Dry Lake by Michael Heiser, those works only exist in the photographs that

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were taken at the time. There are no current markings left and so when we talk about preservation of areas and artworks, in that sense, we're talking about preserving the memory more so than any physical manifestation of that work.

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and not, you know, say a physical thing like a statue. And of course, I suppose that's where the exhibition comes in, because the exhibition is work by these ten contemporary artists who were thinking about what those historic artworks were and what they meant. Could you talk maybe a little bit about the process of the open call? How did you decide that you wanted to start the exhibition with an open call rather than just say researching artists and then commissioning them?

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Oh, that's a great question. Oh, Hikmet, did you have something to say? No, I was going to punt this to you because of the idea of the being on the landscape where these original art pieces were created. And so a requirement of our, of being, you know, a part of our show was that our artists commit to at least one field outing to one of the original five art pieces. Most of those field outings were conducted in conjunction with NVFCP, Nevadans for Cultural Preservation specialists, who were also out doing preservation work at the same time. But there were some artists in the end who ended up going out and experiencing the landscapes for themselves. But that was a requirement for us. And so rather than choose an artist and then give them stipulations to the work, we felt like the process would be more, we would probably get the applicants that we were looking for, where we just spell out exactly what we expected from them. And that is what happened.

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So I feel like the process ended up being the way to go for this.

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That sounds great.

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And it's a, yeah, as somebody who has curated in the past, there are a lot of different ways that one can pull together works of art or artists to then be able to showcase the work that they do, right? What is that core idea? And how does that idea then start to filter through and manifest through all of this? When we did the call, we had specific requirements to glean information from artists. And then we didn't choose works that they had done already. We chose them based upon the strength of their statements, the art that they had done, and our educated sort of guess and assumption that they would then be able to look at the idea of having an homage to one of these works of land art, an homage to the site. And Katie and I had a really great conversation about that word, I was a little hesitant at first because in my mind, this exhibit wasn't about gathering artists who were going to say, yay, land art from the 60s and 70s, and we're just going to recreate what they did. And that ended up not being the case whatsoever. We got a really dynamic group of people who then looked at the idea of an homage as being at the site, being on the ground, and then also doing research, doing a lot of research on who had been there in the past, how had land been used, what is the flora, what is the fauna, how is land very complicated today, and so they all just really rose to that.

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And I love that they're taking that kind of critical look at land art just as a movement, as well as having that critical response. Like you've kind of mentioned, is they're not just recreating it. They're coming at it from a whole different wealth of angles and topics. And I love that. I think it's such a critical viewpoint, and it's such a powerful show because of that. Thank you for saying that.

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Yeah, actually, you know, as a curator, you usually know what your show is going to end up being like. You're choosing the works. You have a pretty good idea from the very beginning what the final result will be. And this was not that. The curing was a little bit nerve-wracking in the sense that we chose artists based on their ideas and on concepts and a lot of those ideas changed radically after our artists had their field visits and that is the kind of energy that we really wanted to impart with the field visits was, look these landscapes are impactful, they're inspiring and that's really what we were So we didn't know what they were going to come up with and there was a lot of retooling. There were a lot of artists who asked if, you know, if our size constraints were serious, if they could please go bigger, if they could add more elements. And it was just, it was all yeses. And we really let them be as creative as they could be to express fully what that landscape and what that previous artwork and that landscape had meant to them. And what they came up with was such a dynamic dialogue, just so interesting and just a lot deeper than I could have imagined.

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They blew me away.

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Exactly. I would like to really reinforce that they blew me away too in the capacity to be able to think so critically and make at the same time make works of art that are in a museum setting that are visually pleasing, that catch somebody's eye, right? So there are lots of ways that as works of they are functioning that way. But I've been thinking, you know, the exhibit opened on the 14th. The opening event was just last Friday. And I feel that we are, we've just finished phase one of our work, which maybe that is going to freak Katie out a little bit. We're just getting started because, again, because of the way that we curated. And we didn't know initially what the artists were going to present. We now have ten different views of these landscapes, of land use, of flora, of fauna. We've got these ten different ways to think about it. And now what do we do with that information? And I think that it is really a real gift that we are at UNLV where the College of Fine Arts has been going through a push to be thinking in the College of Fine Arts on a really interdisciplinary level. And so having conversations with key, you know, with the dean's office folks Friday night to say how do you consider this? How do you think about this interdisciplinary nature? And they're very excited about the fact that as an art exhibit, it is that interdisciplinary.

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Yeah. What are some of the other disciplines you're interacting with? I mean, Katie, I know you're also an archaeologist on top of being, you know, an artist and someone who's interested in arts, what other disciplines are we looking at?

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Right, so naturally Nevadans for Cultural Preservation being a co-sponsor of this event and really wanting to speak to their cause here a little bit, but as an organization They promote recreation to these sites. They promote responsible land use. And so as a partner in this, none of the artists that we were choosing were going to be producing harmful art, removing materials from landscapes, or doing things that otherwise would defy our core principles. So that's important to note that it was done with the ethics of, you know, archaeological preservationists. But also what you see in the show is, you know, there from Mormon Mesa there and Jen Erso's piece, and also identifying and highlighting the botanical specimens located out at Walter de Maria's piece, as Mark Brasband Kempen did for us. You know, we had people speaking the cultural history, so anthropology, you know, genealogy,

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that type of work, and Nicholas B. Jacobson's piece.

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Yeah, true.

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And Katie, you had mentioned some of the artists who were very much wanted to point out the idea of referencing and saying, here I am, and I am working in these landscapes, but I am leaving no trace, and using that as a counterpoint, then, to some of the ways that the previous artists had worked in landscapes. And then we have Kiva Lowe, who worked, created collages related to the ideas of nuclear testing and that presence at Cheandry Lake, again, back to what Jean Tongeli was doing in 1962. Emily Budd is a faculty member at UNLV, who also was working on Cheandry Lake, who's interested in queer renewal and repair in the landscape, and that's in direct response to the blowing up of stuff that Tongali did. So there are a lot of histories that are cultural, religious, military, industrial, that are being sort of mined through all of these different works. So are the people from these regions, right, talking about the Southern Paiute, talking about the Nuu, talking about erasure of people of place in landscape and so they they did, we're we're really proud of the work they did, they went deep in it. Yeah, they did. I

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mean one thing just listening to what you're saying that interests me is that so many of the artists who apply to the Open Call are not local. You know, these issues about preserving the local landscape are obviously of interest to Las Vegas. I mean, you had people applying from as far away as Washington, D.C. I know we had one email from Europe. What do you think drew these other people to Southern Nevada?

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Well, the western United States historically is, I had mentioned Nevada being home to earthworks. Utah also has two famous earthworks in their pocket. And it's a movement that is over 50 years old now. And so I love working with Katie because Katie's work in preservation talking about something 50 years old and older, correlates to my thinking about, okay, these are works that are 50 years old. How often are we talking about other art movements that are 50 years old? We don't read articles every day in art news about conceptualism, right? We don't read other works that started to bubble up in the 60s. But for some reason, land art continues to be in our cultural consciousness. So the Nevada Museum of Art, who we partnered with on this exhibit, in their lending three of the historical images to our show, they did a whole half year of programming and exhibits and a symposium and online lectures. There's a lot that's coming out. Art News just recently came out with a whole guide on works, you know, on how to get to the works of land art around the United States, mostly in the western states. So it's quite fascinating. And the articles that I'm really, really excited by are the indigenous responses to land art as we have more of a understanding and acknowledging that these are a place on contested landscapes and sites just as where I'm living right now in Las Vegas is a contested site. So it's really fascinating. It's like art is giving us this new entree through an old medium to be able to reevaluate ourselves right now in real time and our practices regarding land use. It's very exciting, I think. Sounds like it.

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I mean, apart from the artists in the show, could you maybe name some of those other contemporary land artists who are making work today?

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Or are they just way too many?

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Well, it's a, so it depends and there are a lot of them.

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And what's interesting about that is that when I teach Landart with each successive semester that I teach it, our definition that we craft together in the classroom of land art keeps on expanding further and further. We might have works that were done in the 60s and 70s that had a very specific definition, right? They were site specific. They were made by local material. And now when we think about land art is what Andy Goldsworthy does. Considered land art, I would say yes. My students in current land art class also believe, and so we've added into the mixture, that Seven Magic Mountains is a work of land art. Some people might say that it is a site-specific sculpture, which is different than land art, but one of the students in the current class said, you know, we're a lot younger now and we're learning about the older works, but right now Seven Magic Mountains is our contemporary work of land art. So we're going to include it. And that made sense.

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You just mentioned your students.

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I know that they're involved in the exhibition as well in that their work is visible in the space. Could you talk a little bit about that?

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Sure. And I get to thank, of course, Katie, for some of these ideas. This idea, because as we were getting to know each other, not through the dynamic of being in a class together, but outside of that and starting to work on this project, I'm interested. And of course, Nevadans for Cultural Preservation are consistently using maps and mapping and what maps mean. I have a previous book publication, and in that publication I found an author who writes about maps. And one of his books, his title is How Maps Lie, which, that's really fascinating. I'm like, what? No, maps are supposed to be the truth. Maps are cultural constructs. And so what I wanted to do was introduce students to that idea, how to read a map, but more importantly, what is it that a map tells you? How can you verify its veracity? How do you know if something is old or antiquated or has been updated? And how can you reconfigure a map to make it your own? And so I got maps for, ooh, five, five, six, seven different sites in around Las Vegas. And then the two sites for Spiral Jetty and Sun Tunnels in Utah. So we've got a map of the entire state of Utah, the entire state of Nevada, and then all of these other maps, the students worked in pairs and they could do whatever they wanted to to enhance the information on the map related to the earthwork that was part of that map.

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And actually...

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I have to just interject.

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Yes.

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Sorry. And say, you know, you credit me for some ideas, but honestly, their work and that project also blew me away. Such a neat way to interpret the landscape through your students' eyes. And so, that's all. It's an important part of the exhibition, and so I appreciate you asking about it and Hickman, you explaining it to us.

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Sure. Well, and Katie,

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were there any, I don't know how much time you've had to spend to sort of look at the student maps. Were there any that were surprising to you? Yeah, there were a couple concepts that I really thought were,

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you know, just interesting and dynamic

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and responded directly to their to their earthworks in a way that was, you know, really on point and surprising. Immediately what comes to mind is the student pair who were given the map for Walter D. Maria's Las Vegas piece. And then, you know, using the concept of having to search for a piece that is degraded and no longer obvious on the landscape, they drew the piece, the art piece, into the landscape with UV reactive ink, and so it's not apparent to the naked eye. So as you're studying their map, you see the parts they enhanced are the natural features. And then you have to actually use a blacklight and search the map, search the landscape to find the art piece. And I just love that concept. That was pretty clever.

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Yeah.

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I...

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Go ahead.

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I mean, and I love that you've not only had all of these artists from your open call, but you've also given, like you said, Hikmet, you've given the students the agency to participate in this exhibition and form their own thoughts about land art, especially from what they've learned in class. And I love that you've given them that opportunity, because not every student has an opportunity So, alright. Well again, thank you and I hope everyone has a wonderful day.

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You've been listening to Special Programming, aired in collaboration with the Marjory Barrett Museum of Art on the campus of UNLV. The content of this program did not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz and More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, 91.5 Jazz and More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

Transcribed with Cockatoo