Desert Obsessions: Apsara DiQuinzio on Utah earthworks Posted on November 2, 2009 by Suzanne
Image: A salt desert, looking toward the center of the Spiral Jetty. Photo by Apsara DiQuinzio
[Assistant curator of painting + sculpture Apsara DiQuinzio, on the Utah desert, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels, and more. Part I is here.]
In August I went to Utah for the first time to continue my art-mediated obsession with desert landscapes. I traveled to a portion of The Great Basin—famous home to the Great Salt Lake, the Mormon Church, the glorious Wasatch Mountains, and the Bingham Copper Pit. My purpose, however, was to see the Spiral Jetty (1970) by Robert Smithson and the Sun Tunnels (1973 – 76) by Nancy Holt (two earthworks made by artists who were, incidentally, married), as well as the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Wendover base (active since 1996).
My journey began with a visit to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA), where my friend and former colleague Jill Dawsey (now curator of contemporary art at UMFA) had organized the exhibition Desert Secrets, comprised of photographs from the museum’s collection. Trevor Paglen’s photos—about the geography of state secrecy—were of course already familiar to me. And although I was familiar with Richard Misrach’s work, I had never seen his stunning photograph Chrysler Newport, Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah (1992), of an abandoned old car in the middle of the white, crackling desert, taken in an area in Utah renowned for being so flat and expansive that when you stand in it you can see the earth’s curvature. Misrach has been photographing desert landscapes for over 35 years, and has produced a large body of work referred to as the Desert Cantos, about which Reyner Banham has written, “Misrach’s images are important because they make us see with the eye of art this man-mauled desert that we try not to see in real life, and to see that it is beautiful.” Coming away from the exhibition, I was reminded again of the ominous presences the desert conceals: military bases, nuclear test sites, industrial wreckage. These harbingers of doom are of course interspersed with revelatory moments of natural wonder, making the desert a place rife with contradictions.
