Undermining
A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“A marvelous slim book [that] weaves . . . ideas, facts, images, and histories into a whole about . . . the ecology of the manmade world.” —Rebecca Solnit
In Undermining, the award-winning author, art historian and social critic Lucy R. Lippard delivers “another trademark work” that combines text and full-color images to explore “the intersection of art, the environment, geography and politics” (Kirkus Reviews).
Working from her own experience of life in a New Mexico village, and inspired by the gravel pits in the surrounding landscape, Lippard addresses a number of fascinating themes—including fracking, mining, land art, adobe buildings, ruins, Indian land rights, the Old West, tourism, photography, and water. In her meditations, she illuminates the relationship between culture, industry, and the land. From threatened Native American sacred sites to the history of uranium mining, she offers a skeptical examination of the “subterranean economy.”
Featuring more than two hundred gorgeous color images, Undermining offers a provocative new perspective on the relationship between art and place in a rapidly shifting society.
“[Lippard’s] strength lies in the depth of [her] commitment—her dual loyalty to tradition and modernity and her effort to restore the broken connection between the two.” —Suzi Gablik, The New York Times Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this brilliant and penetrating fantasia on land use and exploitation, writer, activist, and curator Lippard (Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object) invites readers to join her stream of consciousness, taking off from her home "in one of the lower levels of a pit, an arid ancient seabed in northern New Mexico called the Galisto Basin." The book gives equal weight to the verbal and visual, with words flowing along the bottom half of each page and photographs that blur the lines among documentation, journalism, and art along the top, traversing "cultural history and cultural geography" through the archeology and social politics of mineral rights, native rights, adobe, petroglyphs and graffiti; the glamour and exploitation of "cultural tourism" and earthworks/land art; and the oblivious actions of development and capitalism against water, ecological, and climate. She lands in exhilarating fashion on art as a catalyst for change: the political power of photography in the social landscape; the bravery of artists navigating stubborn and archaic bureaucracies to creatively remediate and regenerate superfund sites and brownfields; and new interdisciplinary programs and projects bridging art, science, city planning, and land use. This singular book will stir the "creative energies" of veteran Lippard fans and environmentalists as well as a new generation of artist-activists. 200 color photos.
