Not An Earthwork
By Michael Ned Holte
Excerpt from:
NOT A CORNFIELD: HISTORY/SITE/DOCUMENT (2007)
Janet Owen Driggs, Editor
Lauren Bon, Project Artist
In the single agricultural cycle that marked its ephemeral physical existence—and in its “afterlife”—Lauren Bon’s Not A Cornfield occupied (and occupies) a slippery zone between vision and language. Situated just beyond Downtown Los Angeles, between the neighborhoods of Chinatown and Lincoln Heights, the field of corn that temporarily filled the 32-acre plot provided a startling sight against the glistening urban backdrop to the south.
Like many large-scale, site-based works of art that have been classified in the category of earthwork or land art, the scope of Lauren Bon’s project Not A Cornfield is measured in numbers that increasingly, exponentially, stretch the imagination: 32 acres, 1,500 truckloads of dirt, 875,000 seeds. Yet despite the impressive actuality of these figures, the power of Bon’s work rests in the Gestalt-like clarity of its form. Not surprisingly, like many works of art that take the scale of agriculture, Not A Cornfield began as a vision:
In the summer of 2004, Bon dreamt that, instead of a trash-strewn wasteland, this place she had known from childhood became a flourishing field of corn awash with blue light. Representing a personal vision of transformation made tangible in the world, the planting, watering, and growth of the corn—long a primary cross-cultural symbol of generation and re-generation—will create a potent image of possibility actualized.1
The potency of this image is significant because it aligns the project with a number of precedents, including Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970). Smithson, writing nearly two years after the construction of the 1,500-foot coil of basalt, mud, and dirt at Rozel Point on Utah’s Great Salt Lake, described a visionary—even hallucinatory—first encounter with the site of the earthwork:
As I looked at the site, it reverberated out to the horizons only to suggest an immobile cyclone while flickering light made the entire landscape appear to quake. A dormant earthquake spread into the fluttering stillness, into a spinning sensation without movement. This site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense roundness. From that gyrating space emerged the possibility of the Spiral Jetty. No ideas, no concepts, no systems, no structures, no abstractions could hold themselves together in the actuality of that evidence.2
It hardly matters whether Smithson’s account of this vision, two years after the fact, is truth or fiction. As Craig Owens suggests in his 1979 essay, “Earthwords,” Smithson’s vision aligns the geological, historical, and mythological evidence of the site into a spiral form, constructing a complex allegory of time.3 Likewise, Bon’s dream of “a flourishing field of corn awash with blue light” follows from the site’s historical relationship to (depending on who you ask) the growing and processing of corn, and the longstanding nickname of an industrial wasteland: “The Cornfield.”
Located in one of the oldest areas of the city, the site of Bon’s Not A Cornfield project has a rich if contentious history: as a pre-Columbian Tongva settlement, as the site of the newly established city’s first water system, and as the location of industrialized Los Angeles’ Southern Pacific rail yard. More recently, as the area has become an urban wasteland, its compelling history has nearly faded from collective memory.
Despite the realization of the dream in question, Bon’s title for the project, Not A Cornfield, proclaims that all is not what it appears to be. The name obviously implies negation, as if to say “this is not only a cornfield.” The name also implies the temporal limits of the project, and its planned obsolescence. From the outset, Bon anticipated vacating the site shortly after the harvesting of corn, allowing for the planning of the proposed Los Angeles State Historic Park, which is tentatively scheduled for completion in 2010. The “not” in the title consequently connects the site’s past to its future, while also deferring from its existence in the present—or, more precisely, the life of the project in 2005-2006.
From the emergence of the “genre” in the late 1960s, earthwork or land art projects have frequently suggested a notion of site that comprises not only a geographic location but also a duration—whether fixed (e.g. one agricultural cycle) or implied through benign neglect. In addition, many site-based projects, including Not A Cornfield, extend into the field of language. In her influential 1979 essay, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” Rosalind Krauss introduced the Klein group, a diagram using two sets of axes between four categories—landscape, not-landscape, architecture, not-architecture—to discuss site-based art.4 Krauss situates the modernist category of sculpture between not-landscape and not-architecture; a number of significant earthworks between landscape and “not-landscape,” including Spiral Jetty and Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969), are defined as “marked sites.”5 As an impermanent alteration of its site, Not A Cornfield could be defined as a marked site. However, what is most interesting about the relation of Bon’s project to the diagram is the sense of deferral, or negation, suggested by its name: Not A Cornfield, not a landscape, not an earthwork, and so on. (One could easily disturb Krauss’s too-tidy diagram with the addition of binaries such as agriculture/not-agriculture, film set/not- film set, et cetera.)
If the first generation of land art projects (including those by Smithson, Heizer, and Walter De Maria) became synonymous with vast, open, unpopulated locations—particularly the uncivilized, often sublime terrain of the American Southwest—then much of the next generation of projects would be realized in the urban environment. Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscape was initiated in 1965 and continued until 1978, at the corner of Houston and La Guardia Place in New York City. Sonfist transformed an “urban wasteland” by planting trees and forest plants indigenous to Manhattan in an attempt to re-create the soil and rock formations that existed at the site prior to the arrival of European settlers. In 1974, Bonnie Sherk realized a project titled The Farm on a number of fragmented plots of land adjacent to—and broken up by—the interchange of two freeways in San Francisco. As the name suggests, The Farm incorporated plants and animals. Bringing together experts from a number of disciplines, the project also included the creation of an educational facility at the site. These projects by Sonfist and Sherk, as well as Mel Chin’s more recent Revival Field at Pig’s Eye Landfill in St. Paul, Minnesota (1990–93), were intended to rehabilitate sites that had been degraded by urban reality.
As the setting for land art projects shifted from the remote or untouched land to territorialized sites in these artists’ backyards, so too did the intention behind these projects. In short, Smithson’s investigation of entropy was seemingly replaced with the desire for—if not an achievement of—renewal and sustainability. The preparation required for Not A Cornfield, including the replacement of soil and the creation of an irrigation system, is also preparation for the state park that will eventually occupy the site. But while Bon’s project has a rehabilitative function, the power of the work is ultimately in its resistance to a single (or simple) agenda.
Among a number of land art projects conceived and executed by Agnes Denes, Wheatfield—A Confrontation represents a significant precedent for Not A Cornfield. In 1982, Denes and a crew of assistants planted a two-acre wheat field in lower Manhattan, two blocks from Wall Street and the World Trade Center. The site was hardly pristine real estate: prior to planting an existing landfill—consisting of “rubble, dirt, rusty pipes, automobile tires, old clothing, and other garbage,” according to Denes—was flattened and covered with eighty truckloads of dirt, which provided the necessary inch of topsoil. Photographs of the project are striking, if not genuinely surreal, with the amber field in the foreground and the Statue of Liberty in the background. Another photo shows an assistant driving through Wheatfield on a bright red tractor, with the Manhattan skyline and the World Trade Center as a backdrop. Four months after planting, the wheat was harvested and the plot was transformed into luxury condominiums, reinforcing the temporal boundaries that most land art eventually confronts.
The title of the work—A Confrontation—didactically suggests the artist’s desire to intervene in the heart of civilization:
Wheatfield was a symbol, a universal concept. It represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger, and ecological concerns. It was an intrusion into the Citadel, a confrontation of High Civilization. Then again, it was also Shangri-La, a small paradise, one’s childhood, a hot summer afternoon in the country, peace, forgotten values, simple pleasures.6
Like Denes’ Wheatfield, Bon’s Not A Cornfield is passive aggressive, both “paradise” and “intrusion”—a duality readily suggested by its title. It is at once a cornfield and Not A Cornfield: the art resides in the “not.” The existence of the work, while inherently ephemeral, will persist in its documentation. Soon, most people will “experience” Bon’s project not firsthand, but through related photographs, drawings, archived video feeds, a Web site. All of these provide evidence of a work that, for a short time, looked very much like a cornfield but happened also to be many more things to many people and to numerous overlapping communities. Inserting Not A Cornfield into the long, complex history of the site, Bon surely understands the significance of the work resides, paradoxically, in the fact that it is no longer there.
http://www.notacornfield.info (April, 2005).
Robert Smithson, The Spiral Jetty, in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, (ed.) Jack Flam, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 146.
Craig Owens, Earthwords, October 10 (Fall 1979).
Rosalind Krauss, Sculpture in the Expanded Field, October 8, (Spring 1979).
One could add Smithson’s dialectic of site and non-site to the implication of language in site-based art.
Agnes Denes, Wheatfield—A Confrontation: The Philosophy, Agnes Denes (exhibition catalog), Jill Hartz (ed.), (Ithaca: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1992), p. 118.