Over the Horizon
Abstract
Susanna Newbury, PhD
Associate Professor of Art History
University of Nevada, Las Vegas (USA)
susanna.newbury@unlv.edu

Over the Horizon considers spatial dimensions of intersections between contemporary art and security space in Nevada, a strategically important state in the Western US. Beyond being the home of the internationally known Las Vegas Strip and its hospitality industry, Nevada is the center of two crucial government programs: experimental weapons development and testing, and nuclear waste storage. In a state where over 80% of territory is public, the majority of Nevada’s terrain is nonetheless sequestered from public oversight in restricted space stretching from ground to air. This paper addresses how a work of video art, Omer Fast’s 2011 5,000’ Is the Best, and a work of land art, Michael Heizer’s City (1970-2022) have both mediated and utilized Nevada’s special relation to national security infrastructure to shed light on the influence of place on cultural identity, and on how cultural heritage is itself strategically employed to protect and limit the exploitation of national resources. In so doing, it maps the politics of spatial use across art, architecture, and planning in an unexpected and often overlooked corner of the United States.

Israeli-American artist Omer Fast (b. 1972 Jerusalem, lives and works in Berlin) debuted 5,000’ Is Best at the 2011 Venice Biennale, the premiere global stage for contemporary art. The 30-minute, multi-channel video work uses oral testimony and staged recreations of US military drone pilots’ experiences in the Afghan and Iraq wars to lay bare issues of complicity in participating in and witnessing military engagement. Its title refers to an optimal altitude from which to successfully strike a ground target in unmanned aerial combat. First regarded as a sharp critique of its engagement in the so-called “forever wars,” 5,000 haunts the conclusion of US ground operations in those wars while previewing the remote-controlled present of spectacular conflict. Less well understood is the video’s relationship to Southern Nevada, where it was not only filmed but explicitly set, both in the shadow of the Las Vegas Strip and of two local Air Force Bases serving as central command for US overseas drone operations. Read through this lens, 5,000’ explores how Fast’s video articulates such hauntings in the geography of the homefront, its focus on the quotidian nature of surveillance states predicting its future.

American artist Michael Heizer, (b. 1944 Berkeley, CA, lives and works in New York) is a pioneer of monumental sculpture engaging environmental settings. Since 1970, he has been at work on City, a 1.25-mile-long complex of rammed earth structures in the desert basins north of Las Vegas. Kept secret during its construction, City opened to a (limited) public audience in 2022, admission available through a lengthy wait list administered by the artist’s non-profit foundation. It sits cheek-by-jowl with two notorious US national security sites on Nevada public land: Area 51, a highly classified Air Force training and testing facility officially acknowledged by the US government in 2013, and Yucca Mountain, a long-proposed storage site for US nuclear waste controversial on many levels. Curiously, City, a then-hidden work of contemporary art, became a linchpin in a mid-2000s campaign to prevent Yucca Mountain from being further developed and protecting additional lands around Area 51. Its federal designation in 2015 as federally protected cultural heritage under the 1906 US Antiquities Act effectively blocked transit of nuclear waste to the Yucca Mountain site, and brought an additional 700,000 acres of land bordering classified security sites under government regulation and control.

Over the Horizon examines how these two works’ settings and execution create an opportunity to map contemporary art’s political impact over strategic, and secretive, geography. It also proposes a new methodology for understanding spatial humanities as a process of mapping discrete cultural works to the complex physical and cultural landscapes that produced them. Going a step beyond articulating context dependency, the paper argues that such works of art actively shape the physical, juridical, and geostrategic space they depict, modify, and mediate in the shadow of public scrutiny.