My love for surfing has done (at least) two things to my experience of California: brought me back to the same specific locations with some regularity, and made me crucially interested in some conditions of the place. (Where are the winds coming from? How sharp is that big rock on the left? How deep is the break at low tide?) Surfing has become a way for me to "practice geography."
"Practicing Geography"—this phrase has been ringing in my head for the past half-year, colliding with thoughts on bridging digital and physical space, back-to-the-land millennials, and the experience of topographic surveying. For me, it connotes an attention to site-specific conditions: a desire to engage with place as it is. The practice may deepen with a commitment to return, especially at a timescale on which you start to see geographic change (cc, Terra Fluxus).
My mother's a geographer. This fact, naturally, rubbed off on me. I grew up with ever-present maps and discussion of the nature of place, space, and how people intertwine with landscape. She also loves art museums. Largely because of her, the first thing I wanted to be growing up was a scientist, the second thing a sculptor.
"Practicing Geography"—this phrase has been ringing in my head for the past half-year, colliding with thoughts on bridging digital and physical space, back-to-the-land millennials, and the experience of topographic surveying. For me, it connotes an attention to site-specific conditions: a desire to engage with place as it is. The practice may deepen with a commitment to return, especially at a timescale on which you start to see geographic change (cc, Terra Fluxus).
My mother's a geographer. This fact, naturally, rubbed off on me. I grew up with ever-present maps and discussion of the nature of place, space, and how people intertwine with landscape. She also loves art museums. Largely because of her, the first thing I wanted to be growing up was a scientist, the second thing a sculptor.
Richard Long
As such, when I think of working with land, my mind thinks about the scientists who study it, and then the artists who engage with it. My interest in sculpture shifted over the past decade towards conceptual (and performance) art because I'm excited by the particularities of enactment and getting distance from thinking of art as static objects. Natural processes in the world don't stop: gravity persists, the sun rises, and seasonality drives subtle change. For these reasons, land art participates in the unfolding, varying texture of every day. Land art of the Virginia Dwan era celebrates the object of geography, where it meets sculpture. I want to celebrate instead the practice of geography, to the extent that they're differentiable. (Em Rea's work represents a body of land art that is human-scale and less celebratory of the object, I think.)
I joke sometimes that I'm hoping to become an engineer because I just really like land art. It's not actually a joke. I want to work with natural processes that sculpt our landscape. I also don't see an aesthetic difference between a soaring freeway exchange and something like Heizer's City.
Jay Carlon
A geographic practice can be within anthropogenic landscapes or not. A former coworker of mine, Jay, performs "Dance Film Selfies" where he improvises dance pieces in response to his environment; they started during layovers in airports.
Sometimes observing is just enough. I've touched on Elinor Twohy's 50+ year data set at Jenner, CA. I know few people my age who can imagine staying in one place that long, let alone giving that place daily attention.
I don't have anything I'm getting at here other than that this term—Geographic Practice—has been a lovely handle to help me grasp things that blur artistic, scientific, relational, and observational work. A sensitivity and commitment to place can feel radical at a moment when knowledge and digital work—often disconnected from physical space—feel central to society. I don't mean to imply you should become a farmer, necessarily: your daily walk to work is a geographic practice if your eyes are open.
Getting a finger to the wind,
Lukas