High Desert Mystery

A gigantic grid of 400 polished steel poles on a high plateau on the US Continental Divide.  It’s a mile long by a kilometer wide.  Dia Art Foundation headquartered in NYC owns the surrounding land, making it virtually impossible to see from a public place. Only from an aircraft, or by prior arrangements with the management can you view this ‘art’ work.  It’s located approximately 25 miles North of Pie Town, New Mexico, across dirt roads. 

After you’ve made your arrangements, paid your money and agreed you won’t bring a camera or any electronic gear of any description to the site, you’re ready to go.

You drive to Quemado, New Mexico, at a pre-arranged time, where you’ll leave your car in front of a non-descript building beside US 60.  You’ll load your luggage [empty of cameras and electronic gear] into an SUV and be hauled across a lot of back roads to a cabin already prepared for you with food , bedding, and essentials.

They’ll leave you there with a set of instructions and a radio to contact them in case of emergency.  Otherwise they’ll pick you up the next day and take you back to your car in Quemado. 

You can get an online air view by going to Flash Earth dot com, select Yahoo or Google Maps, typing in the longitude and latitude coordinates 34 26 8.2 N 108 6 37.0 W in the lower right corner and clicking the magnifying glass.

You can use the same process with standard map-road atlas software to show you all the roads you’d need to get there from any direction.  Terrain Navigator software, Delorme Street Atlas paper or software mapping, The Roads of New Mexico atlas, or hard copy USGS 7.5 Minute Topographic Map Quadrangle Tres Lagunas, New Mexico, will tell you everything you need, using those coordinates, to go where you can’t go.

Here are a few links to other sites related to DIA Art Foundation, Walter De Maria, and The Lightning Field:

Walter de Maria art links
The stuff this guy’s doing and the places he does it
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/de_maria_walter.html

The Lightning Field, 1977, by the American sculptor Walter De Maria
The image on the right is one that represents what the Lightning Field actually looks like on the ground, minus the lightning
http://www.cybercityradio.com/html/lightningfield.htm 

The Lightning Field
Located in the middle of nowhere on the continental divide
http://www.lightningfield.org/ 

NY Times about the Lightning Field
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950CE4D9143AF932A1575AC0A9659C8B63 

Lighting Field article by McCord
Illustrates the weirdness though the prices are out of date
http://www.sfaol.com/mccord/lightning.html 

Air view of the Lightning Field
Click Yahoo Maps at Flash Earth and enter 34 26 8.2N 108 6 37.0W
http://www.flashearth.com/

Art and Authoritarianism: Walter De Maria’s “Lightning Field”
John Beardsley - October, Vol. 16, Art World Follies (Spring, 1981), pp. 35-38
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0162-2870(198121)16%3C35%3AAAAWDM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3

DIA Art Foundation’s reaction to publicity about Lightning Field
Put a fly in the ointment of secrecy and here’s what happens
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2006/09/slapped_by_the_.html

De Maria
What Wiki has to say about him
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_De_Maria

The War on Photographers - Lightning Field
The “Lightning Field” artwork. Sculptor Walter De Maria’s gigantic grid of 400 polished steel poles on a high plateau three hours southwest of Albuquerque is strictly off-limits to photography. The work is copyrighted, but the photo restriction is only enforceable because the Dia Art Foundation owns the surrounding land, making it virtually impossible to see from a public place. Private property owners can set their own rules about on-site photography.
http://www.popphoto.com/popularphotographyfeatures/2668/the-war-on-photographers-handling-an-altercation-page6.html

That’s the Walter De Maria Lightning Field experience brought to you by DIA Art Foundation

It’s probably not a giant underground UFO alien base or US Military Black Operations facility as a lot of people conjecture. 

But, heck!  Who knows what’s going on out there between October and May?