Kristin Hough and Faith Sponsler: Pinewood Vortex

Pinewood Vortex

Kristin Hough and Faith Sponsler

Windmill Library, 7060 W Windmill Ln, Las Vegas, NV 89113

April 22 - July 6, 2021

Everything in this Pinewood Vortex exhibition tells you you are not in proximity to the Pinewood Vortex, “a place of mystery … nestled along the Sacramento River, an hour south of the Oregon border,” to quote the brochure by the door. Here are souvenir mugs, souvenir baseball caps, souvenir postcards, and photographs of a forested place on person-sized banners. The Vortex is away, far away, over there: these are the signs of it, and they have been brought to you. Even if the artists hadn’t described the location you would still be able to see the difference between the treed, black-earthed, watery area on the banners and the desert outside the Windmill Library, where nature is a barrel cactus gathering up its strength on the pale sand like a prickly rock. The air above the cactus is clear and empty. The air at the Vortex is filled with green leaves and dark branches. The earth there is shaped not only by the artists (who have dug a long, shallow trench they call The Fifty Foot Hole) but also by the cutting action of a river.You feel there is no river within miles of Windmill Library.

The Vortex (there is no sign of an actual vortex) is the invention of Kristin Hough and Faith Sponsler, who set out, they say, “to widen the scope of who makes and shows land art, a field traditionally male dominated … by employing their own female bodies in digging, carrying, moving, drawing and scheming this new land art into fruition.” The language they use to name their site is the language of retro roadside attractions. Their Longest Line in the World lives on the same plane as the Largest Ball of Twine, or the World’s Tallest Thermometer, that lonely column you can see from the I-15 when you pass by Baker. The font they’ve chosen for their language is retro too. See the twiggy cartoon tree lettering they picked for the banner celebrating the Pile o’ Sticks. There’s that winking “o’” in place of “of.”

If you consider this jokey presentation in light of their text about male and female land artists – and here the Las Vegas audience is probably going to think of Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, over on Mormon Mesa -- then the work in Pinewood Vortex underscores the women’s lack of resources. The Heizers of this world did some hand-digging, but they could also commandeer aircraft, spot their prey from the air, and summon bulldozers to displace 240, 000 tonnes of earth from a harsh desert. A woman – according to the Pinewood Vortex – is smaller: she goes into the pretty woods and scoops out a shallow trench or she heaps up some sticks, and then she makes a hat. It’s not as if she’s deliberately choosing to be less harmful. She’s willing to reshape the earth with her shovel. But she can’t do it on the same scale. She keeps her frame of reference within the boundaries of the United States, where she lives. Her sense of history goes back less than a century, to that twiggy font. The traditional American male Land Artist insists on depth and history. “It is more akin to the communally developed sites of ancient Incas, than to the conceptions of any individual one can think of in modern times,” says the front page of the website for James Turrell’s Roden Crater. The “female bodies” don’t talk like that.

Advertising is their force multiplier. It takes on the role of those ancient Incas. In addition to the souvenirs there are sketchbooks, there is the canvas Line (or a replica of it) heaped up in a tall vitrine; there is a painting of the artists amongst trees under the floating shapes of the sun and moon. (I think this is the only time the “female bodies” are made apparent in the work.) They have designed a website: www.pinewoodvortex.com. You’re aware that this variousness is a function of passing time, not necessarily of womanhood. It reminds you that the age of the masterwork object and the charged gesture of paint that sums up the Soul of Man, has passed. This is a critique of a certain way of thinking about art, and one that had its heyday a little earlier than the traditional American male Land Artists. Wasn’t this momentous Turrellian language already starting to be out of date when he began making work in the late Sixties? Why did he choose it?

What is the difference, asks the Pinewood Vortex, between Double Negative and the Largest Ball of Twine? Does it boil down to the sex appeal of accessibility? If Heizer had bulldozered his trenches next to the I-15, would they be the World’s Biggest Pair of Holes In a Cliff?* Could we sell them on a hat? And if we frame this jaunty commercialised Vortex as a satire on Land Art then why aren’t we doing the same to Seven Magic Mountains?

*The largest ball of twine in the world is either in Cawker City, Kansas, or Darwin, Minnesota, depending on when and how you want to measure these things. Regardless, it’s right next to the road. You have to climb five stairs with railings to stand next to the one in Kansas, which means that the one in Darwin is slightly more accessible, but neither of them ask you to get hold of a durable vehicle and barge your way up the side of a bumpy mesa, which makes them both a thousand times easier to get to than Double Negative. They each have a small, well-kept park.

Posted by D.K. Sole on May 1, 2021