Lucy Lippard's "Undermining " - commentary and review

Lucy Lippard: Undermining
The Anthropocene, Geo-Aesthetics, and Land Use Interpretation

 " ...I wanted to do a small book for a change—an extended essay with a lot of images, a parallel visual/verbal narrative. (I notice some readers are getting that and some aren’t.) ...this book, which is really just a rant about what’s happening right now in the West...

...But one of the obvious questions is the role of art in coming environmental catastrophes. Photographers, and “high” artists using photographic media, obviously have the best access to communicating information about these endless crises. For better or worse, people “believe” photographic imagery more than paintings and sculpture." 

-Lucy Lippard in "Artforum", 5-12-2014 interview, discussing her new book, "Undermining", published in 2014.

I was disappointed in this book for many reasons.  I thought I would be reading art criticism about the large topic of environmental artists and art, perhaps with some history. Certainly the  wee bitty photographs of artworks beside the text help. They're intended to be a parallel, and are far more interesting than the text, unfortunately.  I googled the artists, creating a seminar on environmental conceptual artists for myself.

Mitch Dubrowner - Storm Images   Mitch Dubrowner's landscape photographs create narratives about dystopia and apocalypse by evoking sublime terror.

Would that she had written criticism about each of these artists instead.

Lippard begins with a grand metaphor about gravel pits,excavation, unseen tunnels - her writing exposes the hidden truths and forgotten history of the shameless exploitation and ruination of the areas around Galisteo, New Mexico, where she has lived for many years.  It's quite an extended granular ramble, but she makes no more of it than does a journalist. The grand metaphor seems tacked on, underdeveloped.  

I'm horrified to learn how deeply ruined New Mexico is; facing the consequences of drought, mining, tourism - just like the rest of the West. The contradiction is that Lippard doesn't make the connection from local to global.  Why is her local more awful, more significantly illustrative of our ruined landscape, than my local?

I had also hoped to find in the book a unique and expanding viewpoint/aesthetic for understanding land and environmental art. 

So far, I conclude that photo-journalism, multi-media and interactive programs, and the good old museum label seem the only ways to convey visually the issues implied by an image of a landscape. 

Maybe the gallery goer carries the responsibility of further research into the contextual history of it.      

I've tuned into Lippard's art criticism for years now, as I've struggled to teach and make art.

That struggle is like an excavation for me, undertaken after a sustained, seemingly directionless wandering, another struggle.

I'm trying to discover what I think I should know but don't know that I don't know. I cannot find the facts, the ideas, the knowledge, the history, context, of what I dimly perceive must be out there, and am convinced that if I just keep researching, I will find it. 

I go through this ordeal because I didn't get a thorough art education, I think.  So I keep at it, building a perspective alone when I imagine I could have been "in situ", in an nurturing art world milieu. All part of the deal.

Whatever. Lippard's writings, especially "Mixed Blessings", 1990, helped me escape from a Euro-centric locus as I taught art to Los Angeles public high school students. 

Now, I paint and draw the landscape and its creatures. Mu pastel drawing below is extrapolated from a National Geographic photograph by Michael Milicia in an article titled "Visions of Earth", May, 2012.

Piping Plover and Chicks

I was very moved by the image of the mother bird warming her chicks. How did I change this image?  The adult bird has a leg band, enabling her to be studied by ornithologists.  Why?  

The piping plover is an endangered/threatened species in the U.S. And what about the by baby bird that is excluded?  Why isn't it sheltered?  How did it miss out?  Well, how did the species miss out of the shelter and protection it needs?

abandoned Pittsburg Plate Glass Factory, Owens Valley CA

I painted this after loving the colors the chemicals exposed by the drainage of the Owens River Valley by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.  I never knew what it was until I strapped on my Google search engine.

If this hadn't happened, this factory would have no reason to exist.  But I've always loved how haunted it looks, stripped of its minions and accessories.

My hope is that viewers see the painting is a bit "pretty", softened. The baby pink and blue are the colors of childhood. The abandoned factory becomes elegiac, like old textile factories being converted to living spaces in New England towns along its rushing rivers. But the historical context is jarringly opposite the decorative visual: a ruined desiccated valley, polluted ground