Book Reviews
The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is—and Isn’t, by Steven Conn, 2023
Another attempt to try to differentiate the “urban” from the “countryside”? Actually not so much—it’s more about an overall nation constructed by military, agricultural, industrial, and corporate forces. Chapter one, “Engineering the Landscape” begins with the First Transcontinental Army Motor Transport Expedition, in 1919, a coast to coast road trip from DC to San Francisco with 81 vehicles and 300 men, including Dwight Eisenhower, who as President years later would compel the Interstate Highway System into existence: the largest constructed object ever made, and the thing that really turned the nation into a modern, contiguous, uniform place, composed of connected urbs, suburbs, exurbs, and unurbs. The book continues thematically, using exemplary sites, and heads towards a sense that the USA is an interdependent, interconnected, constructed landscape, dense with people in some places and not in others, and that what used to be rural, if it ever was, isn’t any more.
Houseraising, by Ira Wagner, 2017
A photo book with dozens of color images of houses on the New Jersey Shore that have recently been elevated to protect themselves from being flooded in future storms. Presented in a pleasantly loose typological format, mostly but not entirely head-on, each specimen is an essay on adjusted architecture, detached from their foundations, floated upwards, front doors and garages aloft, anticipating the next superstorm. The photographer is Ira Wagner, the current executive director of the Montclair Art Museum, in New Jersey. The book is one of the distinctive dozens produced over the years by Daylight Books, a nonprofit publisher of documentary and conceptual photography that is often very place-based. Some of the other many include Dammed: Birth to Death of the Colorado River, by Debbie Bentley; Aramco: Above the Oil Fields, by Ayesha Malik; and Floating Island, a book of Mike Osborne’s images from his time as a CLUI resident in Wendover, Utah.
How Infrastructure Works, by Deb Chachra, 2023
An expansive and thoughtful set of observations, ruminations, associations, and suggestions on the subject of infrastructure. At times it feels like a podcast, friendly and first person-y, and often returns to fixed points and personal experiences at certain charismatic megastructures, like the Deer Island Sewage Treatment Plant in Boston, and the Dinorwig Power Station in Wales. Chachra is a refreshing new kind of materialist, a materials science professor (at Olin College, a small engineering college in Massachusetts, founded by the fortunes from the Olin Corporation, itself an important and culturally overlooked ammunition and engineering company). Powerplants, ports, water supply, waste management, superhighways, surveying, time-keeping, national defense, internet, electronic codes governing finances and communications . . . it begins to seem like just about everything is infrastructure, meant to be unnoticed, unless it stops working, as they say. Hopefully the new materialism will help us see that infrastructure might actually be culture.
The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization, by Vince Beiser, 2018
This book asserts that sand is the most important solid substance on earth, and makes its way along interesting paths through the building blocks of civilization that are made mostly of sand: concrete, glass, asphalt, silicone chips (hence computers), and constructed shoreline terrain, made by dredging sand. We learn more about highways, bottles, fracking sand, and the aggregate industry: things like how the aerospace and construction companies Martin and Marietta joined to make missile bases, and remains one of the largest aggregate companies in the USA today (as the recently rebranded Martin Marietta Materials company). The book concludes by discussing a worsening global sand shortage. Perhaps we’ll see about that.
Gowanus Waters, by Steven Hirsch, 2016
The Gowanus Canal is that short urban waterway in New York City that leads deep into the heart of Brooklyn’s increasingly former industrial darkness. These photographs are ambiguous, suggestive, and silent forensic documents of the water surface only, taken over the span of many years and conditions. In some ways they resemble the enhanced images of NASA space telescopes, but looking downward, scalelessly, into the microcosmic swirls and whorls of addled polluted watery phenomena: the colorful patterns and momentary forms created by that sinewy soup of oily postindustrial emissions in the actively stagnant waters of the canal. Important for posterity, if nothing else, and suitably published by Brooklyn’s powerHouse Books.
Landscapes of Extraction: The Art of Mining in the American West, by Betsy Fahlman, 2021
The catalog of an eponymous exhibit shown at the Phoenix Art Museum in 2021-2022, curated by Betsy Fahlman. This subject might simply be just too big, even for the largest museum in the state. Extraction, after all, is what begat most of the hard parts of America (besides the more ephemeral consumables that are grown) and the part that lasts: like our mounds of buildings, roads, and the contents of our landfills. The exhibit/book uses dozens of paintings from the 1930s and 1940s, portraying industry in a now distant New Deal and wartime boom, and the present is represented mostly by a few too few photographic aerials and panoramas. A William L. Fox essay does its best to mind the gap and put things in perspective, citing the tools of early hominids, and those of late hominids, like David Maisel, Michael Light, and Ed Burtynsky—the reigning photographers of extraction. The peak, though, might be Erica Osborne’s steamy 4x8-foot painting, The Chasm of Bingham, overlooking the backside of the Bingham Pit, and spanning the covers of the book.
Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson, by Suzaan Boettger, 2023
Boettger, an art historian who wrote Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties has been working on this book a long, long time, and yet it is still the first biography of Smithson. She attempts to decode him, mining his elusive childhood, his early artwork (Christological and occult), and his incisive, oracular writing, concluding that he is chiseled principally from a mix of “replacement child” syndrome (his brother Harold died before Robert was born) and Roman Catholic gloom and doom. Whether this is true, simplistic, or relevant is in the eye of the beholder. His identity was as much a construction as his art, and he dismissed his early work (mostly paintings, prior to 1965) as pre-conscious groping. He breaks the mold irreversibly when he does the Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, in 1967; develops the site/nonsite dialectic; partially buries the woodshed at Kent State; and builds Spiral Jetty, in 1970. It could have ended there (instead of three years later, crash landing into Stanley Marsh 3’s Amarillo ranch) and that would have done the trick. He seemed to know he was at some kind of apogee at Spiral Jetty, running North by Northwest-like down the Jetty, chased by filming helios-copters, only to face the mirror’s dead end, instead of simply letting himself go, disembarking into the world, off the end of the Jetty—as we know now to do. ♦