The final piece of the Land Arts process is now. All exhibition catalog all the time. There’s so much I could add: it begs the question, what to leave out? How big should this book be? I took roughly10,000 photos. Many of them aren’t of a quality worth including, but if even 1% of them are, that’s 100 photos, and it doesn’t even include the drawings, sketches, or watercolors from the road. Or the pressed flowers. Or the charcoal rubbings. Should this book comprehensively cover my entire program experience, or simply reflect the work for the museum show? The number of decisions here is overwhelming in spite of having seen examples of past books.
And how do I want to present this? In some ways, it’s easy to capture this journey as a throwback to the 19th century, with all the baggage that encapsulates; however, it should not appear to be that exclusively, because it’s not. It needs to reflect 21st century complexity, and ensure that it doesn’t read like a nostalgic manifesto to manifest destiny and the hey-day of colonialist imperialism.
My basic plan has been to prepare to include everything reasonably worthy of showing and then edit the extraneous/less exciting material out and decide on a good layout. This also feels overwhelming. I had a plan for a print size, but it turns out that I don’t like it for the photos or the work I made. On the surface, that’s an easy fix. In practice, it means many, many more decisions and an entirely new design. This is where I find digital space so limiting. It’s easy and cheap to set a thing up and just go with it, but it’s hard to play with design ideas the way you can with tangible objects in space, even two dimensional ones like sheets of paper. Then there’s the fact that graphic design has never been my strength, and it always pains me to make graphic layouts. I am rarely happy with the results and I will too easily lean into things that have worked for me before, which… often aren’t that interesting.
Guess the only thing to do is go to work.