Experiencing art is an unequivocally good thing, even if we don’t at first know why.
If you’re in the world of landscape architecture, you may know about—and may have been lucky enough to experience—the outdoor installation of Mary Miss at the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa. Greenwood Pond: Double Site occupies both land and water in a Des Moines public park, and has been in place since 1996.
If you’re not, this may be a place you’ve only just heard of, and for an unfortunate reason: the Art Center announced in January that the installation has deteriorated to an unsafe condition and must be removed.
We in the interior West are blessed to have lots and lots (and lots! check out this partial list) of land art installations in place, with more planned or under construction. The turn toward outdoor recreation to promote economic development has been helped in our region by these many installations. And why are these works assets? Because they inspire, they inform how to create art with our natural landscapes, and they are far more accessible than the art inside of museums.
But they are not as permanent as they appear, especially after the nearly 30 years that Greenwood Pond has been in place.
So what does it mean?
Takeaway 1: Land art engages people that aren’t always consuming art elsewhere.
Personally, I never set foot in an art museum until I was 17 years old. With my family, we’d stop in to the multiple galleries of Santa Fe sometimes, but that was not a very convenient way to learn about, appreciate, or even see much art. The beauty of land art is its access; by being largely outdoors and open to anyone, there are fewer barriers to reach it. You can think of it as the opposite of a museum, an inside-out museum, even.
One of my favorite pieces of land art is the Seven Magic Mountains installation (pictured at the top of this post), by the artist Ugo Rondinone. Completed in 2016, the striking stone towers are located about 20 miles south of Las Vegas on BLM-owned land. You can hear the artist speak much more eloquently about the public goals of his work than I can in this video, starting at 3:32. Originally intended to be in place for only two years, the Nevada Museum of Art has extended that timeframe at several points due to its popularity. It is an easy stop over on Interstate 15, and BLM generously maintains the rough dirt parking lot and a short trail so that all can access the site. Even when visiting on a hot August day (as I first did), multiple people are there and exploring.
It is an inside-out museum.
Takeaway 2: Using a climate-forward perspective means investing in and maintaining land art for the long term.
My planner friends will likely recognize this mantra, and you may too as a denizen of this country. Our existing infrastructure needs investment to maintain its purpose, from parks to highways to train lines and back to the curbs at our front stoops. All too often, though, elected officials and the funding that they control will prioritize building new things. New roads, new parks with new pickleball courts, and so on. Unless our fiscal balance sheets enjoy a permanent influx of new money, their decisions will eventually put us in a bind where we have built too much to feasibly maintain.
In the case of land and site-specific artworks, two questions should be answered before installation: how long do we intend for this to last? and how will we make sure our inside-out museums reach that milestone? Seven Magic Mountains’ popularity has surpassed its original deadline to be decommissioned several times. Has this second question been asked at the time of each extension? I don’t know, but I am hopeful.
Plannerthon 