Book Review: Lure of the Local by Lucy Lippard

Abstract submitted for:
NMDS.5004: Understanding Media Studies Fall 08
Professor Shannon Mattern, PHD

Lippard, Lucy. Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (The New Press, New York 1997)

Lucy Lippard presents a personal journal to find one’s identity within a fragmented society. Her book, Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society is a vast attempt to describe the connections we make to the landscape in a transformation of space into the establishment of place, and how we have become multicentered through a process of dislocation and immigration.

The person who has lived in a single place all their life is unique in modern culture, just as someone who is of pure ethnic heritage. A distinctive accent or “local” knowledge is easily spotted in stark contrast to the transient nature of the modern American Landscape. Most people move every four years and most adults live in houses that are younger than they are. These are the conditions that have created a stress upon society that has compelled us to form micro communities in an effort to reclaim a sense of identity. Lure of the Local illustrates the need and the means for forming connections to place.

Lippard draws upon the voices of many. Rather than present specific research she unfolds a logic model based upon first defining the difference between space and place, and then further describing the formation of place through history and memory. The text builds on the ideas of community, geography, and representation and presents a challenge to artist to “recover the geographical imagination and to introduce moral discourse” into the places we live and work.

The beginning of the book offers readers some clues at reading the landscape from a historical perspective. “Every Landscape is a hermetic narrative.” An archeological approach is necessary to sift through the layers of fragments that we encounter in any “place” we have lived in or traveled through. We are invited to look at the origins of names, histories, and maps, and encouraged to stay awhile to go beyond the reading of landscape as a survivor mode utilized by the woodsmen or any urban traveler. The reader is asked to linger and consider the significance of memory within place, the unwritten histories that are not visible on a map, but can be found in the stories of the locals who remember. “Perhaps the only lay people who are really able to interpret social landscapes are locals – those who can recognize subtleties of change in a place over time, who know what the lumps and bumps once were and what has replaced them.”

From an art history perspective, Lippard is challenging contemporary artists go beyond mirroring beauty in objects intended for home décor. She looks to photography and site based art as having the greatest potential for connecting the diverse narratives of a place and challenges artist to insert a “moral discourse” into local land use issues.

Lippard focuses primarily on photography and site specific art. Photography has the ability to simultaneously be “high art” and scientific record and has the power of reproduction that enables it transcend art. Photography has been used to support the ideology of the American West myth and has been utilized by organizations like the Sierra Club to foster support for preservation. All too often however, the beauty in the landscape photography is nothing more than “Eco Porn” used to hide the abuses of land use and development. “The role of aestheticization is the most difficult issue within the issue of communicating not only how the landscape looks, or seems, but how it is.” The landscape cannot be seen as purely phenomenological and therefore neutral. It is symbolic representation of cultural values. The modern landscape photographer spends as much time in the library as they do in the field making photographs. The image is inextricably linked to the text narrative of place. One cannot look at the landscape photographs of Drex Brooks without being further impacted by the knowledge that what they are looking at is a place where a massacre occurred.

Lippard points to the structuralist approaches of photographers like Ed Ruscha and Lewis Baltz and hints at the work of the other New Topographic photographers as a means of suggesting a need for the narrative details that lie between each image. She goes to the snapshot as an example of photographs that hold fragments of history and suggest that artist can do more to support discourse through focusing on content over form. The landscape photographer is encouraged to look at signs, and fragments, to illustrate the palimpsest in banal social spaces. Time and again Lippard is telling us that the landscape is a reflection of the qualities of culture and the photograph can serve as a journalistic endeavor to confront us about ourselves.

She further cites the works of Robert Smithson and the ideal of land reclamation artwork as a means to “reclaim damaged nature as culture…” Lippard is not neutral in her presentation of arguments for the role of artist in such issues. She is essentially utilizing the text as a way to further highlight the injustices she sees within land use practices.

From an academic perspective, Lure of the Local introduces the concepts of community, history, preservation, and ‘neogeography’ or ‘social mapping’. She is developing the idea of multicentered society based upon the perpetual state of human dislocation and immigration and the impact this has on the landscape. T.S. Eliot wrote “home is where we start from” and thus we are compelled to bring our cultural viewpoints to any new location. The potential of any landscape is cultivated through diverse cultural perspectives. She charts a progression from indigenous, native, local, and outsider that offers us a way of looking at the discourse within a region. “All places exist somewhere between the inside and outside views of them.”

We are asked to look at the names of places and to see the difference between indigenous naming conventions that ”tend to identify resources for the common good” and European names that are more about “what it looks like” and “who was there” and utilize names as “proof of ownership.”

These place names are cataloged on maps which Lippard points out are not neutral and support the ideology of the person who made them. Maps are inherently powerful because they, like photographs, are perceived as truth, as a factual representation of what is there. Lippard shares many map-making efforts that are endeavoring to represent the culture of the local that is missing from the dominant hegemony maps. It is the establishment of boundaries that asserts power over space.

A large section of the book is dedicated to land use and is an indictment of the political processes that determine where hazardous waste is dumped, zoning codes, and environmental battles between ranchers and conservationist. Lippard also points out the landscape as a gendered space, particularly when viewed in terms of home and safety and the conditions that led to the development of the suburbs.

It seems as though Lippard is challenging us to engage in our own history and draw out the history of others through the reproduction of narratives. Individual histories as told through our own voices are less subjugated to hegemony than when it is left to others. Those who write history control it. Without specifically articulating it, Lippard is presenting the concept of discursive formation of meaning and is presenting these concepts within a discursive manner filled with examples and narratives from artist such as Houston Conwill, Agness Denes, and Carrie Mae Weems. The reader is encouraged to take part in this discourse on a local or regional level.

There are many critics of this book. Lippard seems prepared for the criticism and ends her text with a response to those who would criticize her. “Some of the ideas conveyed here will be (and have been) attacked as retrograde. So be it I am tired of the prevailing disrespect for emotive retrospection, which is a valuable component of communication if balanced by local knowledge and critical curiosity. One way society disempowers people is to give them no credit for their thoughts and accomplishments.”

As an academic text, I have to say it is a difficult text for a new student as it doesn’t speak directly to a single line of reason but is rather more like a patchwork quilt of ideas drawn from many disciplines of study and from the personal travels and connections of the author. It doesn’t speak too much about specifics of landscape, structures, systems, climates, etc. but deals with the impressions and concepts, and the role artist can play in protesting the injustices the author has noted and others we might find when observing the context of place. It is a text that is absorbed indirectly over time, fragments slowly pulled together to form an impression. One doesn’t leave this book, but rather comes and goes from it making a web of connections to personal practice.

In the end, Lure of the Local is not so much about rooting one’s self but instead, being responsive and responsible in how we interact within the places we travel and to find a wholeness through our relationship with ‘place’.