There are few works of art produced in the United States since the Second World War that have experienced a more uneven and generally unusual reception than The Lightning Field by Walter De Maria of 1977. Alongside Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969) and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), The Lightning Field iconically defines the type of large, site-specific Earthwork characteristic of Land Art’s critical and popular ascension in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet despite its centrality to the formation of Land Art, critics and scholars treat The Lightning Field more often as a splashy illustration for book jackets and magazine covers than as an object of scholarly consideration. Part of this reticence to write about the work may stem from the high degree of control reserved by the artist and the Dia Art Foundation, which oversaw the creation of The Lightning Field and continues to maintain it. In addition to making the trek to a remote town in western New Mexico, visitors to the work must pay a significant fee, arrive with no more than five others, waive the right to photograph the work, and stay on-site, sleeping and eating in the Field’s nearby cabin, for a full day. Quite famously, De Maria and Dia’s management of The Lightning Field extends also to the domain of publication and reproduction rights. Dia hired photographer John Cliett to live at the work for extended periods in 1978 and 1979 and create hundreds of photographs of the Field in different atmospheric conditions; yet only a half dozen of these have been released and thus constitute an equally narrow and official version of the work in print. Into this field of lacunae and contention about one of the most significant works of its generation steps Kenneth Baker’s long-awaited book, The Lightning Field.

Baker’s text is at once a product of and an intervention into this particular reception history. Following an excellent preface written by Dia curator Lynne Cooke, the book is organized around two essays named according to the date of their creation: “1978” and “1994–2007.” Baker wrote the former and shorter of the two as part of a commission from Dia in the months immediately following The Lightning Field’s completion in October 1977. “Wanting to ensure that from its inception The Lightning Field would have an ongoing audience long into the future,” Cooke explains, De Maria and Dia conceived of “[building] interest via a book commissioned from an individual who, after spending considerable amounts of time on site, might write a situated account” (xi). As a result, Baker arrived in New Mexico in 1978 for a week-long residency at The Lightning Field. The essay he wrote in response to this first visit, however, did not befit the approach and format anticipated by its underwriters, and as a consequence, Baker’s important early account of De Maria’s work was largely set aside for three decades. The present book arrives after many years of extended negotiation for publication rights of De Maria’s work, which is marked by the fact that The Lightning Field volume contains only a single illustration and bears no image on its cover.

Now finally available to readers and with only minor revision, “1978” provides the most attentive “situated” account of The Lightning Field yet to appear in print. Not a traditional art-historical treatment and, likewise, more expansive than the art criticism Baker had written for the likes of Artforum and Studio International earlier in the 1970s, this essay most takes the form of so-called New Journalism. Baker’s account attends to the visceral experiences of traveling to the site and living alongside The Lightning Field for a series of days. Similar to Philip Leider’s notable essay and travelogue about Earthworks in the September 1970 issue of Artforum, “How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” Baker’s approach in “1978” addresses The Lightning Field as a living thing of the world. The presence of Taster’s Choice, Pan Am jets, and the individuals he encounters going to and from New Mexico make Baker’s account a valuable period piece written in the Field’s direct environs.

Some of his more pointed formal observations and arguments about De Maria’s work have appeared elsewhere in his published writing, as in the critical essay “A Use for Beauty” of 1984 (Artforum 22 no. 5 [January 1984]: 65–66) and in the final chapter of his previous book, Minimalism: Art of Circumstance (New York: Abbeville Press, 1989). In these texts, and more fully in the original context of “1978,” Baker clarifies a set of perceptual dynamics for The Lightning Field that move beyond misleading or reductive interpretive traps often associated with the work. One of these arises from the connection between the Field and De Maria’s 1969 sculpture Bed of Spikes. As a large, five-part work arranged in grids of sharpened metal bars, Bed of Spikes directly contributed to De Maria’s later plan for The Lightning Field; but as Baker notes, the formal parallel between this work and the Field can incorrectly cast the latter as simply a scalar expansion of a smaller, self-contained indoor sculpture. Baker also identifies the function of lightning itself as a deceptive quality of The Lightning Field. As featured in the title of the work and pictured prominently in its photographs, lightning suggests a type of on/off experience at the site in which the inert metal poles occasionally spring into life at the instantaneousness moment of electrical discharge. Cutting across both of these pitfalls, Baker quite rightly articulates the importance of reflected light at The Lightning Field as a specific and consistent feature of the site. Light reveals the environment as mirrored in the polished steel of the Field’s poles as it also manipulates the appearance of the overall work’s color, solidity, and cohesive shape with the position and intensity of the sun moving across the sky. Baker’s account astutely connects the slow, temporal unfolding of The Lightning Field’s form with the way this process intensifies one’s own awareness of its environment.

This is not to suggest that Baker eschews the historical valences of The Lightning Field. By weaving together a series of references throughout his account, he provides a sense of De Maria’s earlier artistic work in the 1960s and 1970s and also of phenomenology as an interpretive framework for sixties sculpture. But Baker does not position himself with the distance of a historian surveying his object. When voices such as those of Hannah Arendt or Octavio Paz enter the discussion, the author addresses them as if interlocutors in a present and ongoing conversation. As a case in point, the layout of both essays in The Lightning Field avoids the use of quotation marks and imbedded text and instead signals a change of voice merely by shifting typeface. Thus, in a subtle manner Baker has written a book about language and the ways in which one’s own critical voice must take shape in the living arena of other texts.

If “1978” grapples with the personal experience of both traveling to and staying with The Lightning Field immediately following its completion, Baker’s more recent and longer essay, “1994–2007,” provides the inverse. Rather than articulate the demands and insights of living in the presence of a mercurial work of art for a fixed period of time, it extends a series of meditations that stayed with the author long after he left the Field’s physical site. As a matter of practicality, the essay takes its point of departure from an invitation Baker received in the 1990s to expand upon his previous essay on The Lightning Field by returning to the site on several more occasions and during different seasons of the year. The resulting text, however, takes a form entirely different from its predecessor. It is divided into fifty subsections that structure the argument. Distantly akin to the short chapters in a text like Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, Baker’s sections revolve around a common subject but proceed along various and often seemingly incongruous tangents. Topics such as “target area,” “device,” “touch,” “Roswell,” “posthuman,” and “pilgrimage” are each spurred in different ways by The Lightning Field but develop near-self-contained reflections about the personal, political, environmental, and cultural conditions of inhabiting the earth. One section might take its departure from a direct experience with the work, another from a reaction to the remoteness of the site, and yet another from an unexpected event such as military planes passing overhead at The Lightning Field.

At their most incisive, Baker’s short excurses provide a helpful rejoinder to the art historian’s accepted patterns of rhetoric. The section on “wilderness” is a case in point. By drawing together questions of simulation in recent writing about land management with Fredric Jameson’s classic argument about the cultural logic of late capitalism, Baker positions The Lightning Field as work that is not simply located in an isolated place but instead one that operates strategically as a device of isolation. What is more, he considers it a “philosophically repriming situation” (46). To readers of recent ecocriticism, the conjunction of Jameson and discussions of sustainability might present little surprise, but Baker’s discussion distinguishes itself through the resonance of his returning time and again to The Lightning Field to test his arguments against ever-changing experiences of the work.

In the subsequent section, on “cabins,” the author veers in another direction entirely by linking a series of reflections on the appearance in the 1990s of Theodore Kaczynski’s former home at the site of his trial in Sacramento, California, to ways in which the cabin sited at The Lightning Field ties together local histories of inhabiting the land in Catron County, New Mexico. While Baker’s personal, near-memoir-like approach at times can lead his discussion afield of De Maria’s work proper, the significant passage of time invested in his prose nonetheless provides his reflections on the whole with a tangible sense of the work’s substance and reach. The sum of his account makes clear that The Lightning Field is best understood in longer rather than shorter runs of time, which, considering the near decade of planning and construction it took to realize the work, would seem to have been instilled in The Lightning Field from its very inception.

Baker has neither written nor has he attempted to write a definitive account of The Lightning Field. There are limitations to even the best of his short pieces, as the very structure of his argument introduces interpretative insights and frameworks more than it develops them into robust conclusions. Baker acknowledges this proviso himself in his introduction. The publication of these two essays on De Maria’s most important single work should therefore be taken as an invitation to a new generation of critical and historical work on Land Art. Understandings of the natural environment have altered in significant ways since the creation of The Lightning Field in 1977, and there is now an opportunity to look back upon the first generation of land-based practices with a more tempered historical perspective about the ways these works conceived of and interacted with the biological world. Baker’s own extensive and fruitful encounters with The Lightning Field over three decades propose some important points of entry.