Inspired by you, driving up, or rather, being driven, to Northern Michigan, I trained my eyes to perceive the 3-dimensionality of the landscape passing by.

Yesterday, I sketch the dunes. It was fun, distorting what I saw to put more on the page than was in my binocular vision, laterally.

Sometimes I feel like that fellow in George Eliot’s “MiddleMarch” who keeps saying vaguely, “ah yes, went into all that at one time.” My memory is the pits so I’m totally delighted you reminded me.

We are having some remodeling done to the house and I’m going to have to pull my fabric/sewing storage area apart and stash it elsewhere. I have a roll of wool batting — about, oh, 2 feet across — a lot of batting, as well as tons of fabric, much of it blanks in cotton and silk. Now it seems to me that the underlying premise of the desert vista is that it gives you nowhere to stop your eyes except the somewhere that might be a horizon, if only the mist would allow you to see it. If I were 25 (or even 50) I would consider buying a 12 foot ladder and using all my fabric to turn my 400 square feet of studio into a space where nowhere stops the eye, although there is much to see everywhere and yet not much to see. All the narration would be within and with whatever was around, behind, moving the materials; the meaning would have to come from the environment and from within, not from the art, although the art would be the precipitating factor.

Anyone around Portland who is young enough to hoist 12 foot ladders and daft enough to want to try something? Ah, I thought not……….. But there’s still that roll of batting and the clerestory windows that would shine through it, mucking up the greens behind……

I’m re-reading Seeing is Forgetting… on Robert Irwin, and was reminded that at a critical point in his career–he’d given up his studio, sold his things–he started driving out in the desert and noticed the kinds of presences he felt in certain places. Perceptual, not spiritual ones.

…the comparison with some of Heizer’s photomurals is particularly apt, because Irwin, too, was interested in how he might recreate that uncanny sense of presence in a gallery. But rather than literally pasting the desert vista to the walls of such spaces, Irwin chose to absorb the lessons of the desert and apply them, on a site by site basis, to each new room whose presence he would be confronting and trying to modulate during the coming years.

I have seen that landscape (many years ago), but from too far above, with no cues as to what I was looking at. What I really want to see it from is a Piper Cub.

It isn’t flying I object to — it’s airline protocol and ugliness. I can’t imagine why anyone would spend any time taking a commercial flight except in matters of life and death (and maybe paying the rent). The experience in the terminal and seats is horrible beyond anything my regular life presents me with, so I avoid it.

The Varnadoe quote is very much in line with what Fox is tracking (and it may be Varnadoe I was thinking about earlier). In fact, Fox says that at times City looks like “the traces of an ancient civilization.” Here’s Fox on Heizer’s “City.”

“‘City’ is a structure built in the middle ground of a desert valley and as such there is no competition for our attention. Like the poet Wallace Steven’s proverbial ‘Jar in Tennessee,’ it orders all around it — or rather, enables us to do so, though as a work of art it holds a few caveats for us. Viewing ‘city’ is not as simple as looking at telephone poles or a barn on a farm. If, for example, you don’t know the size of the sculpture, it can be very confusing: the valley looks looks much smaller than it really is; your walking time up to the leading edge of the site seems to take forever. ….’City’ doesn’t look what we expect of art; it’s too big and geometrical, too unexpectedly both a part of and apart from the land in which it sits.”

“In the just-before-dawn light, the absence framed by “City” is much more palpable than in the strong unfiltered daylight of the hight desert. Last year Heizer made two new “negative paintings.,” empty square and circular steel frames. They need to be watched at for a while before it becomes apparent that the frames are not the art. They are devices to focus our attention on what’s not there. the spaces enclosed by the steel. That’s also one aspect of “City”. The geometrical lines and solids of the complexes are more than just a frame, are indeed objects to be looked at and considered, but they also define and articulate an empty space, an absence, that is an essential component of the sculpture.

“I say “watched” instead of “looked at” because the active elapsing of time in the process of consideration is important. We don’t just look at, or even into, a void, though that’s how we usually “frame” the activity with words. We actively engage it. We first look at it, then into, then all around it to see if we can find its edges, not least of all so we don’t fall into it. Our vision penetrates the empty space, and our eyes attempt to focus, an automatic and uncontrollable reaction of the nervous system that is doomed to failure, there being nothing our binocular gaze can coordinate upon in space. All of this takes a few seconds before either we begin to move away from what has become an unsettling experience, or we settle down to see what happens.”

I (June) quote at such length because I think that’s what was happening to me and what I was doing for those six solitary weeks, although I had no words for it — a kind of articulation void.

Later Fox says “City” is the “first exhibit in my contention that the void is an imaginative construct necessary for us to place ourselves in the world. We need a perceptual frontier over which we can peer in order to imagine that there is still an unoccupied space to go into, at least in our imaginations if not in reality. We need a space where the grid fails to cocoon us …. We need a space where our customoary perceptual protocols fail, and we find ourselves in the presence of some other, some nonhuman sensibility”… Heizer has made the void visible by the only means we know, surrounding it by perceptible form and making geometry and nature coextensive.”

I(June) am susceptible to this idea of the void if only because of the mystery that it contains. It’s a mystery we face with a blank canvas, although there at least we can hurry up and obliterate the void. In certain medical tests, they test inner ear functioning by boxing the patient in with no visual cues; all the cues for standing upright have to taken from gravity as it acts on ears and on proprioceptive (body) sensations. I find David’s paintings actions upon a void, in part because I cannot imagine, until I see them manifest, how he will parse that void of the canvas. A video of the process, set up within wall without visual cues, would be fascinating.

This isn’t quite on track, but talk of Heizer and near and far ground reminded me of a passage in Varnedoe’s Mellon lectures on abstract art I was just reading:

In earthworks like Heizer’s it is the play between the close up and the faraway, between the view with one’s feet on the ground and the aerial view, that is important. The ground view of Double Negative aimed down into one of the trenches is interesting in this regard. The ground view is about embedded layers of structure, embedded layers of geology; in archaeological terms, it represents layers of human development, stratified time, time that is accreted, time that is textured, time that is the cumulative buildup of minute incidents. The aerial view, on the other hand, shows Double Negative as something globally unified, with a brute, unerring simplicity, something that stands out as a man-made absolute against the geological forces of erosion of the canyon.

See images of Double Negative here.

Your reference to “naked” mountains hit a spot. Those mountains in Nevada are definitely naked and provocative as such. June, you may remember the logging museum in northern Pa. where one can see photographs of the hills shorn of cover, shaved, de-nuded. It is so good to see a forest reassert itself in that area and in the Grand Canyon of Pa.

And, June, please overcome your aversion to flying and take a flight out of L.A. for points East. No red eye as you really need to see the void from a perspective seven or eight miles up and hundreds of miles out. Anybody who reads the Sky Mall catalog while that multi-hued vastness is shouting at you, has wood for eyeballs.