FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“A smart and winning book.… The reader emerges enlightened and even delighted.… Hogan delivers an ingeniously engaging travelogue-cum-art history.”
Atlantic

“Across this marvelously unexpected little road saga, the stud muffin cowboys of late twentieth-century American art at long last meet their sly gamine match. Pretty much doing for land art what Geoff Dyer did for D. H. Lawrence, Ms. Hogan, an urban fish decidedly out of water, flopping about in the high desert parch, makes for marvelously endearing company. An at times harrowingly (albeit comically) unreliable navigator (who doesn’t bring a compass along on solo treks across such vast empty expanses?), Hogan nevertheless manages to deploy an expertly modulated prose, tracking the heaviest of subjects with the lightest of touches, melding gravitas and whimsy (vodka and tonic), in a narrative that in the end, like the art it surveys, manages to be about what it is to be an individual alone—pinprick-contingent, achingly vulnerable, gobsmacked enthralled—in the face of all that is.”
Lawrence Weschler

Spiral Jetta
A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West

Erin Hogan

As we’ve been reminded by the recent outcry over the threat of destructive drilling near Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, the monumental works of land art in the American West have a powerful hold on fans of contemporary art. To Erin Hogan, their very remoteness and precariousness is a crucial part of their appeal—and she knew that to fully understand and appreciate the questions about scale, permanence, and the limits of human activity raised by such works, she would have to actually go see them in person. So in the autumn of 2004, Hogan threw some sunscreen and some sketchy directions into her Volkswagen Jetta and hit the road, leaving the comforts of the city behind and plunging headlong into the vast expanse of the great American desert.

Spiral Jetta is the story of that 3,000-mile journey. By the end of her trip, Hogan had seen the sun rise over Lightning Field and had strange men compete to buy her drinks in a smoky redneck bar in Nowhere, Nevada. She’d surreptitiously tasted the salt riming Spiral Jetty, and she’d scrambled up and down the sides of Double Negative as if it were a jungle gym. She’d witnessed the allure, and the troubling dark side, of the contemporary art mecca of Marfa, Texas. And in her solitude, she’d thought about art and its place, in the culture and in her life. Written with a wry wit and an eye for the unusual, Spiral Jetta is a gallery tour like none you’ve ever experienced, with the most capable and compelling of guides.

Erin Hogan is director of public affairs at the Art Institute of Chicago.

 

Erin Hogan is available for interviews. For more information, please contact Levi Stahl at (773) 702-0289 or lstahl@press.uchicago.edu