How to be alone, get lost, and find art
“Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?” asked Jack Kerouac. Erin Hogan was going on a solitary tour of the monumental land art of the American West. She says in an interview Saturday in the Salt Lake Tribune that she re-read Kerouac and “definitely felt like I was involving myself in the Great American Road saga.”
Reporter Julie Checkoway wonders: why visit land art?
Land art is this arena you walk into, and it changes your sense of space and time. The people who made it were trying to set up a different experience, giving us something. I wanted to experience that, a surprising built environment. But really, the book is mostly a road book. Yeah, I meditate on Michael Fried and the theatricality of landscape, but I’d like to think that someone who didn’t study art history like I did would encounter something very beautiful in Spiral Jetty.
Update June 11: Erin Hogan is also interviewed today on ArtInfo.
We have an excerpt from the Spiral Jetty section of the book as well as our own interview with Hogan.