Shocks & Awe

By Blake Gopnik

The Washington Post

August 13, 2009

QUEMADO, N.M.

Only six people are allowed to see it every day, and only for six months of the year.

It's thousands of miles from the big art scenes on either coast, and hours from the nearest city.

Photos are not allowed, so it barely even circulates in pictures.

There's even a tiny chance that, if you don't follow instructions, it could help you wind up dead.

And yet, for many of the few who've made the pilgrimage, it turns out to be 'one of the great works of art of the last century.'

That, at least, was the judgment of one art-historian friend, not usually prone to hyperbole, when he returned from a summer visit to 'The Lightning Field,' a huge work of 'land art' hidden in the middle of New Mexico. His rave got me to go.

A classic patch of sagebrush-covered land, set on an empty plateau 7,200 feet high. A ring of jagged mountains at its edges, out-cliche-ing any Hollywood western. And in the middle, 400 lightning rods, custom-made from stainless steel and laid out in a grid that stretches a mile in one direction and a kilometer in the other. Set 220 feet apart, the rods tower to several times the height of a tall man; whatever kind of mound or furrow they get planted in, their tops all reach to the same table-flat height.

This is that 'great work of art,' built in 1977 by a 42-year-old New Yorker named Walter de Maria, who got his patrons at the Dia Art Foundation to buy the land and commission its conversion into art. De Maria and his work are famous in the art world. What seems strange, once you've visited his masterwork, is how they could be so little-known outside of it.

'Lightning Field' kept me looking and thinking for longer than I've ever spent with any other work of art, at least all in one stretch. I wandered the site nonstop from afternoon to night of one long summer's day, and then from before dawn to almost noon the next.

I admit that I lucked out. There were evening thunderstorms the first day I went, and the mountains all around were bright with lightning. (De Maria chose the area partly for its electrical storms: They occur on something like 60 days each year.) Although no strikes hit the rods while I was looking -- you're not supposed to be out among them, anyway, when a storm's right overhead -- that could have been for the best.

There's no doubt the piece looks great by storm light, when it's likely to give as many goose bumps as 'Las Meninas' or the Sistine ceiling. But the best thing about 'Lightning Field' is that it seems to work at least as well, or better, by any other kind of light, at almost any moment that you come across it.

There is no single 'Lightning Field' -- that name's the one false note in the whole piece. Every time you look at it, this work feels new, and acquires meanings that you hadn't thought of earlier.

Its central virtue may be that, unlike almost any other artwork you could name, it doesn't have a single central virtue.

* * *

It's good that 'Lightning Field' provides so much to see, because getting to see it is a chore. You'd better book months in advance if you want to visit on a day that fits your schedule. (The site is open daily May through October, and booking, which starts in March, is by mail only.)

Your overnight visit will cost you $250 -- nonrefundable -- which can only be paid by check, again by mail, to Dia, which still owns and tends the work. If that sounds like a lot of money, note that food and lodging are included and that a bad hotel in New York could cost you more than that. The whole experience, including airfare, comes to less than the cost of one low-end artist's print.

From the Albuquerque airport, you have a three-hour drive ahead of you, south and west to the tiny town of Quemado (pop. 324), where you need to be by 2:30 p.m. That's when Dia caretakers pile the latest batch of visitors -- never more than six at a time, by order of the artist -- into a muddy 4-by-4 for a winding drive across rural roads that lasts almost an hour. Eventually, you're dropped off at a vintage log cabin, the site's original homestead, that's even more John Wayne than the landscape around it. The car will be back to drive you out again the next morning at 11.

You drop your bags, maybe take a swig of water, walk out the back door, and you're in a work of art, as you've never been before. Ideas pile up.

Thought 1: The long trip was necessary to the meaning of this art. One way or another, de Maria's piece is clearly about the West, so it's only right that there should be some kind of trek to get you to your destination. That's why the log cabin also feels so right. If you stand in the no man's land between the cabin and the field of rods, you can go from looking 'back' at the homestead and the region's past, and 'forward' to de Maria's version of its future.

Thought 2: The future seen in

Copyright © 2009 The Washington Post, All Rights Reserved.