Inside and Outside
A trip to the Lightning Fields, New Mexico.
In a very remote mountain plain in New Mexico, a bare wood cabin faces an open field that is filled with 400 stainless-steel poles. Each pole is two inches in diameter, and several times the height of a person. They are planted in the ground at equal distances from one another to form a grid 1-mile by 1-km.The poles have no apparent purpose. It takes 2 hours to walk around the permitter of the outer poles. At times, depending on where you’re standing, it seems they are placed haphazardly — but a brief concentration reveals the calculated equidistant placement, and the straight lines of steel in all directions. At sunrise, and sunset, the sun falls on the poles in such a way that they seem to be thin pillars of gold heralding the end or the start of the day. The experience is spiritual. Though it’s difficult to do, if you somehow stumbled on the isolated site, not knowing its purpose, I suspect you would find its perfectly measured and manufactured appearance unsettling — an unnerving encounter with an intelligent enterprise whose intent you can’t comprehend. I can’t help but think that the first impression might be that it is some sort of modern Stonehenge.
I found myself wandering through this field last Monday, which is known as The Lightning Field. It’s a land art piece constructed during the 1970s by the minimalist New York based artist Walter De Maria, who passed away this June. Each night, for six months out of the year, six new visitors, often strangers to each other, are shepherded to the remote cabin to sleep overnight and experience The Lightning Field.
This site was our primary destination on a ‘let’s go see art in the South’ trip that I planned with my fellow design friend Sascha. It was Sascha who first introduced me to Walter De Maria on a walking art tour he gives of SoHo. He also provided the photos you see in this article — so I owe him double thanks, and also recommend you take his tour if you have the chance — here’s a link.
The Lightning Field moniker comes from the notion that during thunderstorms overhead, the poles should attract lightning strikes. In theory, it should be like Zeus at target practice, striking down brilliant bolts at all the pointed steel tips — scattering webs of lightning across the sky. In reality, as past visitors had told me, the weather in the area is often clear and sunny. And, despite the dynamic weather system of the mountain plain where you can often see several independent storms forming and interacting on the various horizons, even when it does rain, the poles themselves are rarely struck.
The day we travelled to the field, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and there was definitely no lightning. But, I wonder if this illusory promise of the Lightning Field, this quest out to a remote part of the country to see some incredible spectacle of nature, to see the elements amplified through technology, only to find a bucolic field in which to wander alone, isn’t actually all an essential part of the art. The inert journey sets the stage. The solitary escape, the encouragement to amble alone in an open field, away from the cell signals and the background hum of other people, has become spectacle enough. There are many aspects to the piece that make it brilliant.
The specific location of The Lightning Filed is undisclosed, but you’re driven to the site along with the other visitors from a small nearby town called Quemado. The field itself is cloistered by mountains in the distance, and the only sign of society beyond the cabin and the Lightning Field is the fence and windmill of a ranch some ways off.
The instructions in the cabin encourage you to spend plenty of time wandering through the field, preferably alone, in order to experience the piece properly. I spent a few hours in the field by myself, at first trying to stay in the confines of my thoughts. I thought about the raw materials I had to work with coming out here: the build up of knowledge and experiences, the current things that were on my mind that I wanted to work out, the stones I wanted to turn, the balance between taking in the place and taking the time to do some introspection, the urge to produce something. I thought about all the other people that had wandered these fields. I imagined the catalog of their collective thoughts and wants, I wondered at the substance of their inner explorations, the conclusions they may have reached, the choices they may have made, the commitments they would seek to follow through on when they returned to the real world — the sum of their impressions suspended invisibly in the open field. Did anyone ever fall in love, or out of love walking around in the Lightning Field? What were those things people decide to let go of or hold on to? Drifting in the field, the perspective of the other people’s figures in the distance, sitting down or walking about, the sight of the cabin that represented a safe haven to return to, the initial fear of snakes and scorpions, and the eventual acceptance of safety, all combined to make the place some sort of ethereal catharsis. When night fell, the field grew cold, and the stars were more visible than in any sky I’ve ever seen before.
And it’s this sort of disconnected, dream like memory that one is left with of the place. The very idea of crafting an experience where people journey to this remote area to spend sometime with themselves in nature, among this perfectly manufactured sculpture, is a striking example of creating wonder in the world.
Lots of thoughts passed through my head meandering in the field. Some questions came to mind: Fifty years from now, what will a visit to the The Lightning Field be like? Will there still be a place where cell signals do not reach? For all our heightened abilities, will we have a better sense of what to do?
My guess is we’ll have a lot of the same things on our minds.
