New Works & Forthcoming

AEREALITY: Essays on the World from Above. For the last two years I’ve been writing about how we construct aerial views, either physically by flying or in our imaginations. The book is now due out from Counterpoint (which used to be Shoemaker & Hoard) in either late 2008 or early 2009.

In spring of 2006 I flew around the American deserts with photographer Michael Light, and then around the Los Angeles region, where we were joined by geographer Denis Cosgrove. We looked at earthworks in Nevada and Utah, flew into the world’s largest open pit mine, and circumnavigated classic examples of urban sprawl. That’s produced the first six chapters for the “Out West” section of the book. That summer I flew around New England and New York with Joe Thompson, the director of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and then with Matt Coolidge from the Center for Land Use Interpretation. The consequent “Back East” portion of the book traces the development of American identity through elevated art of the Hudson River Valley and New York City.

The third section takes place in Australia, which was explored and mapped from the air, and thus has a rich history of aerial imagery. I flew in small planes, helicopters and balloons over the desert, pastoral properties, and Canberra, as well as drove across a large portion of the country with artist Kim Mahood. I look at the history and current practice of both Euro-Australian and Aboriginal aerial views, and examine the cognitive roots of our aerial imagination.

An outgrowth of this project was an invitation from Denis Cosgrove, the renowned geographer at UCLA, to co-author an illustrated volume titled Photography and Flight for Reaktion Books in London. We managed to complete the manuscript before Denis passed away early this year, and I’m now working on tracking down images for it. Reaktion hopes to bring it out late in 2008.

I spent two weeks during fall 2007 in Chile, most of it working in the Atacama Desert with students to test out the methodology from the Land Arts of the American West in what Incubo, our sponsoring organization in Santiago, calls the Atacama Lab. I have a large essay in the book about the project that’s being published in spring 2008. If you want a peek at the trip, you can go to: www.earthworkslab.org.

Two photography books appearing in fall 2008 also have essays by me in them. Stuart Klipper’s panoramic pictures of the Antarctic, The Antarctic: From the Circle to the Pole, and Bay Area photographer Linda Connor’s first large book, Linda Connor: Photographs 1978-2008 will both be handsome projects. Klipper’s book also includes an essay by historian Stephen J. Pyne, and the Connor book has a conversation among the photographer, Robert Adams, and William Garnett.

I’m also publishing the lead essay in photographer Mark Lisk’s book about the Owyhee Canyonlands forthcoming this year from Caxton Press. Mark and I collaborated several years ago on his book Desert Water, published by Graphic Arts in Portland.

Anthologies continue to publish my work, and I am very grateful to their editors for including me. This last year Barry Lopez put a piece about the Nevada Test Site that had been in Orion magazine into his The Future of Nature from Milkweed Press. Essentially it’s a “best of Orion” during the last fifteen years. In a similar vein, my essay for the Nevada Museum of Art about Robert Morrison was included in A Sculpture Reader: Contemporary Sculpture Since 1980 from Sculpture Magazine. Susan Fox Rogers used my essay Leaving the Ice, which also appeared first in Orion, as a piece in her Antarctica: Life on the Ice from Traveler’s Tales.

Anthology appearances in 2008 include essays in Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark, edited by Paul Bogard from the University of Nevada Press and in High Places: Cultural Geographies of Mountains and Ice, edited Denis Cosgrove from IB Tauris in London.

Climbing My. Limbo: Essays on the Edge of Land and Language is a collection of essays based on experiences as varied as climbing desert peaks in Nevada, leading treks in the Himalaya, tracking down rock art in Baja California, sailing up China’s Yangtze River, and working in the polar regions. Counterpoint plans to publish it in 2009.

Mark Klett and I continue to seek a publisher for our collaboration in photography and text for the book set in Wendover, Tinian, and Hiroshima about the erosion of history. The Half-Life of History, as we’re now calling it,

Floating Island is another collaboration, this one an experimental set of “cartographs” by artist Katherine Bash with texts by me integrated throughout. We also worked out of the Center for Land Use Interpretation facility in Wendover, and this very limited boxed edition will be published by the Black Rock Press at the University of Nevada Reno in late 2008.

. . . and on the horizon . . .

Two new book projects are in the first stages of development. All Along the Line examines how and why we make lines in the landscape. The first one I’m writing is about the Dog Fence in Australia, at 3550 miles the longest fence in the world. Then there’s a line of poetry by Raul Zurita in Chile that’s the world’s longest line of text--a four-kilometer-long script bulldozed into the Atacama. And Matt Coolidge and I have been scheming a trip along the Alaska Pipeline in summer of 2008. Stay tuned.

I’ve also been working on a book with the working title of The Art of the Anthropocene, which will trace the development of land arts from 1970 to now, and how it relates to the concurrent rise of earth systems science. I may actually finish this manuscript before the line book, although I haven’t yet sought a publisher for it.

And then there's poetry--The Mirror Line. I continue to work on the poetry manuscript I’ve been engaged with since 2002, extended meditations on the nature of optical and linguistic reflexivity--which is to say mirrors, echoes, eclipses, and other manifestations. Early versions of pieces have appeared recently in Spectaculum and Fo A rm, and as small chapbooks from Hull Press and the Itinerant Laboratory for Perceptual Inquiry in London. I don’t yet have a project finish date in mind, nor a publisher.

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