Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing

80 Book Review >>> Carly Marburger Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West

Lippard, Lucy R. New York: The New Press, 2013. 208 pp.

Though roughly averaging only 160 words on each of its 208 pages, Undermining is anything but brief. Each page is equipped with two to four photographs, whether they are photographs of landscape or objects or works of art. Between the text, pictures, and illuminating footnotes, each two page spread provides more than enough to take in. Lippard’s free flowing sentences, stories and statistics reiterate that you cannot place her content into categories. Everything is connected. She travels through anecdotes about Native American relations, discussions on land art and photography, mining and fracking practices, water shortages in the West and everything in between. Using gravel pits as her symbol for the relationship between the manmade and the natural world, Lucy Lippard’s thoughts stem from home and reach out to everyone. The West is her focus, yet she realizes that honing in on her beloved New Mexico provides the specificity her explorations need. The content of her pages depends on and is inspired by where she spends her daily life. She quotes Eudora Welty, who once wrote, “One place understood helps us understand all places better” (134). Lucy Lippard positions her book around gravel. Gravel pits pop up wherever gravel is created, and in the West, this happens a lot. Someone who looks at the West from the outside and visits to enjoy the nature may relate to the definition of landscape that she asks readers to dispel right from the start. Generally, readers may think of landscape as a beautiful snapshot of nature, but this view is very selective. The landscape of a place is not the panorama that you carefully position the grandest mountain or the greenest trees within, it is the relationship between the land and the manmade. It is easy to separate the rocky mountainside peppered with elk from the landfills in a photo, but that is not representative of true landscape. Lippard ensures that her readers understand that landscape is the collaboration between people and nature and all of the gravel that comes with it, not the picture-perfect depiction of what lies on the horizon. If the majority of the images associated with the West are beautiful and alive, why be concerned? As expected, most people who do not live in the West are not aware of its politics, resources or needs. Lucy Lippard made this clear to me, as my eyes were opened not only to things happening on the other end of the country but also to the notion that we should make a point to know these things. Unfortunately, so many things are hidden that you may not even know what is happening in your own backyard. The mining, or ‘undermining,’ as she calls it, that digs up the gravel we see on the surface of the Earth creates invisible graves under our feet. Many do not see the physical impact because they only see what is in front of them. It is like thousands of booby traps that have not fallen through yet; leaves and dirt cover the unstable platform, waiting for the right foot to send everything down. Lippard talks

about the Split Estate Rule that so many homeowners in the West are unaware of. Upon selling a home, land is sold twice if it is worthy. It is sold once for what is above the surface, and sold again for what lies below it. She includes a noteworthy copy of a banner created and displayed internationally by Oliver Ressler in the early 2000’s. It reads in bold letters, “Imagine shaking this land from below. Stirring it up, turning it upside down to expose all of the plundering and exploitation, and then spreading it out again, without a top and without a bottom, except for its mountains and valleys” (187). Lippard is at her finest when she is showcasing the words of other writers and the ideas of artists as she explores her own thoughts on the controversial topics she addresses. As a curator, she is responsible for taking pieces of art and finding how they fit together to create a finished installment or exhibition. In this instance, she is dealing with digital images and a book full of pages. In addition to the images she selects, she also employs amazing numbers of case studies in her writing. Each one, she states, “could have been replaced by dozens of others” (189). With so many variables to shuffle, a lot of the decisions and relationships she creates go unnoticed by the reader. It becomes an overload of sensory information when the text and images continue in the same capacity page after page. Readers may find themselves reading the book for its words and forgetting that there are pictures directly above them with footnotes below. Without reading the footnotes, most pictures remain homeless, unable to be placed in their own context by the viewer. Lippard alludes to the effect of photography without captions, arguing that without them, “We have no idea what part of the world we’re seeing –where it is, how it got there, or what part of life it shelters” (168). Additionally, many viewers may not even care all that much; yet, I encourage readers to be the viewer that cares. Care to read the footnotes and care to look up an unfamiliar case study. While Undermining can be overwhelming, the vast number of directions that this book can take are an integral part of its value.