An Essential Solitude:
Walter De Maria's The Lightning Field
Revisited

In this deeply contemplative meditation on Walter De Maria’s monumental earthwork, Kathleen Shields draws upon her three decades as The Lightning Field’s administrator to offer an unprecedented examination of one of Land Art’s most enigmatic masterpieces. Through her privileged position as both steward and witness, Shields articulates the complex phenomenological dimensions of De Maria’s precisely calibrated intervention in the New Mexican landscape—a grid of 400 stainless-steel poles extending one mile by one kilometer and six meters—while simultaneously interrogating the work’s evolving relationship to contemporary modes of artistic reception, particularly in light of John Cliett’s widely circulated photographs that have come to mediate public understanding of this site-specific installation.

Drawing upon her seminal 1989 Artspace essay of the same title, Shields’s text uses institutional history, personal narrative, and critical theory to illuminate The Lightning Field’s transformation from a radical gesture of late-1970s Land Art into what she terms “a living work-in-progress,” one whose meaning continues to evolve through its dynamic engagement with both its immediate context—the rural expanses of Catron County—and the broader technological and cultural shifts that have reshaped artistic experience in the digital age. Through careful attention to the contributions of figures like Robert Weathers, the site’s longtime caretaker, and a nuanced consideration of De Maria’s original conception of the work as demanding extended temporal and physical engagement, Shields constructs a compelling argument for the continued relevance of unmediated encounter with art in an increasingly virtual world, while simultaneously positioning The Lightning Field as a crucial site for reconsidering human relationships to wilderness, solitude, and the sublime in contemporary culture.

Published by SNAP Editions, New York, 2020

Essay by Kathleen Shields

Designed by Michael Motley

180 pages

_{© The Estate of Walter De Maria}