Spiral Jetta
A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West
- Contents
- Review Quotes

Chapter 2 Sun Tunnels
Chapter 3 Moab
Chapter 4 Double Negative
Chapter 5 Roden Crater
Chapter 6 Lightning Field
Chapter 7 Juárez
Chapter 8 Marfa
Doing the Pilgrimage
Readings and References
“The title’s overly coy allusion to Robert Smithson’s masterpiece doesn’t detract from a smart and winning book. Hogan, the public-affairs director at the Art Institute of Chicago, does her best to arrange an unhappy marriage—a land-art tour ‘through the states of Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas’ and ‘through the states of anxiety, drunkenness, disorientation, and heat exhaustion’—but the reader emerges enlightened and even delighted. After all, making critical theory fun is quite a feat. Casually scrutinizing the artistic works Sun Tunnels, Double Negative, Roden Crater, and Lightning Field while gamely playing up her fish-out-of-water status, Hogan delivers an ingeniously engaging travelogue-cum-art history.”
“Blending a humorous travelogue and serious musings, in Spiral Jetta she winds her car and the reader through the complexities of 1970s earthworks and contemporary aesthetics via a varied landscape of people, places, and art. . . She is great at keeping the reader’s attention: two pages of art philosophy; ten pages of fun.”
Art: American Art
Travel and Tourism: Travel Writing and Guides
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