Viewers' Sensorium

Jeanette Hart-Mann and Bill Gilbert

August 24th, 2012

A View South From Roden Crater
Photo: Lea Andersson

The first site/s of inquiry on the 2012 Land Arts of the American West expedition entailed a day spent between investigating Wupatki National Monument and Roden Crater.  In proximity to these built environments, strewn among volcanic accumulations, human habitation, transitional eco-niches, and James Turrell's monumental earthwork, conversations gathered around issues addressing the environment, art, land use, social processes, sensory perceptions, and sustainability.

Wokoki Ruins at Wupatki National Monument
Photo: Bill Gilbert

Wupatki National Monument is a series of "footprints," or architectural structures built within the Sunset Crater region in northeastern Arizona.  These ancestral Puebloan structures have been rebuilt several times over the last one hundred and fifty years in government attempts to hold in time a story of other.

Wupatki Visitor Center, information signage
Photo: Amelia Zaraftis

Students explored the ruins at Wupatki and Wokoki, discovering architecture literally embedded in rock outcrops with shards dispersed over the terrain, and a series of inviting places to sit and sketch.

Eric Cook discovers a small bead on the ground 
and shares it with the group.
Photo: Jeanette Hart-Mann

Eric Cook looks closely at a small bead
Photo: Jeanette Hart-Mann

Land Arts students sketch in the Wupatki community plaza
Photo: Lea Andersson

A circular structure filled with rain runoff, which is thought to have
been one of many things, from ball court to water reservoir
Photo: Bill Gilbert

Amelia Zaraftis and Heike Qualitz working on Safety Complex Series
Photo: Jeanette Hart-Mann

While camping at Sunset Crater National Monument, guest artists, Amelia Zaraftis and Heike Qualitz work on performing and documenting a language puzzle in action, performing semaphore to investigate place.  Both Zaraftis and Qualitz are Field Coordinators with the Field Studies Program of the School of Art, Australian National University, in Canberra, Australia.  This program is very similar to Land Arts of the American West, taking studio arts students into the field to explore the cultural action of art in relation to community and environment.  Land Arts alumni, Blake Gibson, Yoshi Hayashi, Joseph Moguel, and Cedra Wood joined John Reid and Bill Gilbert last summer for a month of travel through New South Wales and South Australia.

Driving towards Roden Crater
Photo: Amelia Zaraftis

Eso Robinson looks at an aerial image of Roden Crater
Photo: Jeff Nibert

At our final destination, Roden Crater, Tom McGrath greeted us with unwavering enthusiasm and generosity.  As a Roden veteran of seventeen years, he has been a key player in the engineering and problem solving of this megalithic earthwork, which James Turrell conceived of in 1974 and has been working on ever since.

Tom McGrath describes the multiple phases of construction,
while showing a model of Roden Crater
Photo: Bill Gilbert

Tom points to every detail and describes the way that architectural form, light,
and space, inform a bodily experience of the multitude of chambers and portals
Photo: Jeanette Hart-Mann

The project is built within a volcanic crater and consists of a series of architectural spaces, which frame celestial events and make space and time for the perceptual investigation of viewers' sensorium in relation to these phenomenon.

Tom talks to Land Arts of the American West Professor, Bill Gilbert
Photo: Jeanette Hart-Mann

Sunset arc observed from the rim of Roden Crater
Photo: Jeanette Hart-Mann

Waiting for the night-rise on the rim of Roden Crater, we observe a bizarre and ethereal play of atmosphere through the accumulated contrast of light and dark, performing a transitional movement of sunset.

Constructs and Experience

Cecilia McKinnon

August 24th, 2012

Wupatki

        Wupatki is so beautiful, but so difficult to walk through. The exhibit acknowledged the displacement of the original inhabitants as recently as the 60's to establish the site as a monument, but the motion toward taking accountability felt hollow considering we were still accessing the site as tourists visiting a museum. There are worlds of difference between admitting wrong-doing and making real reparations, but I don't even know what those reparations would look like at this point. The exhibit kept reminding us that the indigenous people didn't mysteriously vanish into the mists of time, but the establishment of the monument reinforces this idea of the native inhabitants as a historical and anthropological study, not a community in the present that continues to suffer the effects of colonization. I grew up thinking of the National Parks system as being a force of good, of conservation, but here we see it functioning as a tool of imperialism, using paternalistic justifications to force native people off their lands so they could be made into a museum and a monument.

Roden Crater

        Roden Crater was a similarly problematic site to visit. I went in feeling a lot of resistance because the site is such a textbook example of western imperialism--James Turrell not only built his work in a place sacred to native people, but literally within view of the closest reservation, maybe five or six miles away, and in doing so closed off access to all except those who he hired to construct his vision. Even if the work is someday completed to the extent of the grand plans they have now, it seems unlikely that it would be truly open to the public, only those who can pay for the privilege.  

The level of ego involved in a project of this scale is slightly astonishing. I imagine the intended experience is a sort of mystical encounter with increasingly greater views of the abstracted sky/celestial events, with the climactic re-entrance into the world as a sort of birth experience into this awe-inspiring landscape. In effect, though, seeing the landscape made me feel a kind of pity for the structures--I don't think any building could ever hope to compete with those views. Further, it just felt like the structure was trying to co-opt the landscape into its own agenda, almost taking a kind of credit for the surrounding beauty, rather than as a project trying to augment and dwell unobtrusively within the beauty already present. The way they talked about preservation of the landscape, about having "restored" the crater to it's original shape, reminded me of nothing so much as people who fix up old houses and sell them at high prices. I'm not an advocate for industrialization, but I do object to outsiders coming into a community and finding ways to dictate access to and use of the surrounding spaces.

As a site it takes itself so seriously, constructing this identity of some ahistorical and timeless monolith, but the points at which I really engaged with the space were the currents of transience--the cockroach in the Portal room, the bat in the eye of the crater, the bird that seemed to have built a nest in one of the light fixtures. I didn't really enjoy the space until I started treating it irreverently, making shadow animals on the white marble, animal noises echo down the dark hallways. It was all very otherworldly, but ultimately, I was relieved to return to the outside and feel the breeze and see the stars.

Ancient Viscera

Eso Robinson

We wind our way through the ruins of Wupatki, naturally gathering in what once was the central communal space, sitting in intervals, degrees of a compass, in relative silence.  A constant soft sound is that of pencil on paper, and the insect-like clicking of cameras.  (Any other mechanical sounds have already begun to seem foreign.)  

The viscera of the water and wind-worn stones draws me in, as do the details always - their textures highlighted by the suns angles, shadows accumulating in concavities. Such forms are hard evidence of elemental effects - time and weather’s persistence.

Wupatki Solitude

Erik Cook
August 24th, 2012

Bead discovered at Wupatki

          We arrived at Wupatki five minutes before the ranger station opened.  When the doors swung open, we proceeded to look through the visitor center.  Everyone else hung in there for a while, but I headed right for the site.  I was the first one there, a privilege I have learned to cherish.  I much prefer the silence of solitude that first light brings to these ancient ruins (I have had similar experiences at various great houses at Chaco).  The solitude provides me with a clearer picture of the true energy of the structure, this place was a home for kin groups and must have had great ceremonial and social events.  The large great kiva and ball court attest to this.  I was naturally drawn down to the great kiva after my initial exploration of the site.  I sat cross-legged in the very center of the great kiva and wrote in my journal.  I was still alone, almost dreading the moment another person would join me.  Naturally I glanced across the dirt in front of me, eyes always keen in places like this.  To my great surprise and satisfaction, I found a tiny bead, probably from an ancient necklace, lying in the dirt right where I sat.  I scraped it our of the ground with my finger and held it close to my eye.  Had any other human being laid eyes on this artifact since the dirt covered it over some eight hundred years ago?  Heavy rains in the recent days had surely uncovered it, and I was the fortunate soul to happen upon it and unearth it.  A sense of connection flooded over me, almost as if I was transported back in time, and I sat in the kiva in pure contentment, letting Wupatki talk to my soul.

Flooded Ball Court

View of Wupatki from inside the Great Kiva

         I also found sherds consisting of grey corrugated, red ware, and black-on-white painted ware.  One of the more striking points about this site was how the builders used large boulders naturally in their home, building around them masterfully, utililizing them to their advantage.  I headed down to the ball court, a rare site in this region.  This naturally leads to much speculation about the contact between Meso-American cultures and Keyenta-Anasazi culture.  The recent rains had flooded the court, turning it into a contained pond, but it was still impressive.  I couldn't help but think this place must have been bustling with energy, culture bursting from the seams from a vibrant group of people.  Ancestral Puebloan sites being an affinity of mine, this was an amazing first stop on our three-week journey, one that I will certainly never forget.