Toward the end of August, I visited Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field near the small town of Quemado, New Mexico. The Lightning Field is a one-mile-by-one-kilometer grid of 400 stainless-steel poles that taper into sharp points. The poles are calibrated against the undulations of the ground to be the same height.
While walking through the Field, two things made me feel profoundly disoriented. First, the structure of the Field prompts the desire to locate your position inside it. The logic of the grid layout, which governs the placement and spacing of the poles, implicitly assigns coordinates to you. But to extrapolate them from your vantage point is nearly impossible.
Second, though the layout of the Field is conceptually easy to parse, it offers no stable reference points for navigation. The identical poles shift and align as you pass among them, marking ticks on the far blue ridge. You observe your passage over the uneven terrain — dry scrub, brown clay — but cannot measure how far you have come. You seem instead to walk without progress. Here is a resonant remark from Agnes Martin, whose oeuvre demonstrates a meditative fixation on grids:
And here, concerning a different type of grid, is an excerpt from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, after Alice and the Red Queen run together through a landscape patterned as a large chessboard. Alice notes that their surroundings appear unchanged. The Queen responds:
Alice expresses excitement when she attains this vantage point, which reveals the layout of the country in its entirety.
To experience the Field is to experience being a point on a plane. And the desire of the point is to cease being a point at all — to stand outside of the system, as Alice does, and apprehend it in full.
De Maria, of course, considered an aerial perspective of The Lightning Field to have no value. An integral part of the work, he maintained, is the relation between ground and sky, which a grid knows nothing about.