The whole mad thing: chronicling the journey to land art

This article takes as its subject the earliest texts chronicling the journey to works of land art in the American West. It demonstrates that the artistic innovation represented by land art was accompanied by a corresponding innovation in the discursive field—a new kind of writing—concerned not only with the author’s engagement with land art but also with the journey required to access it. It argues that travellers to land art are predisposed to certain modes of engagement by the place, or places, through which they pass to get there. An important case study in this regard is Philip Leider’s text describing his encounter with a ‘truckload of bombs’ during a 1970 road trip to Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969–70). Furthermore, this article contends that the journey to land art—as recorded in texts by Diane Waldman in 1971, Calvin Tomkins in 1976, and many others—conforms to the logic of pilgrimage in that hardships and obstacles encountered on the road augment land art’s perceived holiness. Finally, it is shown that extraneous details in these texts produce a Barthesian ‘reality effect’, authenticating them by anchoring them in the fabric of the ‘real’.