The Nature of Art

On the drive from Santa Fe to Las Vegas recounted in his essay "Selected Overpasses," Bill Fox -- or, as he's known on the covers of his books, William L. Fox -- counted many things. Overpasses. Trains. Cop cars. Hitchhikers. Dead animals. It was a mental exercise: How many things can I keep track of? Q: Do you have a head for numbers? A: "No. I had to do it with pads and pens," Fox reports. Picture, then, a man trying to note, at 75 mph, the number and height of an overpass at the same time he spies a train or whizzes past a hitchhiker. "I almost killed myself a bunch of times."

The point was not simply to allay the boredom of a drive he'd made often already -- although that was certainly part of it -- but to consciously quantify his motion across the land. "I'm curious," he writes, "about how we move through terrain from point to point, tracing a line on foot or by car, and constructing a mental picture of land, an analog, a 'landscape' -- and how that fits into the art of the region."

As you can surmise from a single sentence that includes the words "art" and "analog" and puts quote marks around "landscape," Fox is a serious, intelligent writer. Don't let that put you off. "Selected Overpasses" is one of three essays in Fox's new book, "Driving By Memory" (University of New Mexico Press, $18.95), each of which describes a road trip to Las Vegas from a different direction -- Santa Fe, Los Angeles and Reno.

While they aren't comic fear-and-loathing romps, they are entertaining meditations braiding Fox's thoughts on land and landscape, cultural and natural geographies, urban planning, art, history and memory. Don't let that put you off. They go down easy. The writing is sturdy and accessible, commendably free of eight-syllable words and scholarly jargon, enlivened by punchy history lessons (for instance, about the way 19th century landscape painting influenced our national park system) and funky factoids (29,000 people are reportedly arrested annually for public drunkenness in Gallup, N.M., a city of 20,000).

Nothing if not prolific, Fox has another new book out. "Mapping the Empty" (University of Nevada Press, $34.95) consists of eight essays about Nevada artists and their relationships to the state's distinctive geography. Of necessity, it features a bit more art lingo, yet it, too, is quite readable. (He's also published 14 collections of his poetry.)

He is, as you might imagine, a difficult writer to label. "Landscape/art-writing guy" is accurate if ungainly. One publisher has chipped in with "cultural geographer." "So you ask, what does that mean?" Fox says. "Well, I write about how we transform land into landscape through art, architecture and memory." No, really, don't let that put you off.

A sense of boundaries

"Land," Fox says, "is the world as we find it. Landscape is what happens next." He's sitting, feet curled to his right, on a couch in the home office of his friend, the painter Robert Beckmann, with whom he stays during his frequent trips to Las Vegas (Fox lives in Los Angeles). He's dressed in baggy shorts and shirt, catching a breather in the middle of yet another road trip. "I'm all scratched up because I just came in from several days of looking at petroglyphs in southeast Nevada," he'd explained earlier.

Because Beckmann's Henderson home is on a bulge in the valley slope, the glittering vista of nighttime Las Vegas is visible beyond the patio doors. Appropriate. Wherever he's lived since leaving Nevada six years ago -- after 13 years with the state's arts council, nine as director -- Las Vegas has frequently been on his mind. That's partly thanks to his continuing connection to the arts here (he's in town this time to judge an art contest), and partly because the city is a prime example of his thoughts on land and landscape being played out. Land: the actual desert. Landscape: everything we build on it or project onto it by way of imagination, mythology, art. That's where "Driving By Memory" sets up shop.

"The landscape that's interesting to me about Los Angeles is in some ways what's interesting about Las Vegas," he says, "and that is the determination to overrule the landscape with the city.

"And I mean overrule in the sense of laying a ruler over the land and plotting a grid of streets, then extending that in every direction as far as the eye can see. And even when you're in a basin, like Los Angeles, or a valley, like Las Vegas, the overruling tends to spill out past the natural boundaries. We just sort of ignore them."

Q: You can see it creeping perilously close to Red Rock.

A: "Yes. And that's something one would hope would not happen. That there would be a distinct boundary at some point to this city. So you could say, 'The city ends, and now the relatively unaltered desert begins.' That's a very healthy sense of a boundary to have."

Boundaries would force the city to turn inward, to be creative about developing its interior. "It makes for a city that is more cohesive architecturally, more interesting, more lively. And Las Vegas may, because it's coming at the end of the 20th century, when all these things are being talked about, it may have a chance to reinvent itself in that direction. If it can turn inward instead of continuing to sprawl outward, Las Vegas could become a more interesting city than it already is. And it's already a very interesting city."

Some artists

Fox knows a thing or two about reinvention. He did it himself in 1993 when he left the arts council. "I moved to Santa Fe, to be with the woman I was going to marry, and, also, to make a very conscious break from being an arts administrator and go back to being a writer."

Yet, in a sense, he never left; "Mapping the Empty" is proof. The book was born a few years ago, when Beckmann asked his friend to pen an essay for the exhibit catalogue of Beckmann's notable "Body of a House" paintings. Another artist asked for similar treatment, and Fox found himself writing enough essays about Nevada artists to fill a book.

Over the years he visited Nevada frequently (those drives were the genesis of "Driving By Memory") to write about -- besides Beckmann -- Michael Heizer, Jim McCormick, Dennis Parks, Bill Barker, Mary Ann Bonjourni, Rita Deanin Abbey and Walter McNamara.

"They're artists who are fully mature in their careers," Fox says. "They were people who had been in the state, for the most part, a long time, who had made significant contributions to the culture of the state, who I think needed to be written about before all that was lost."

Drawing on many sources

Six years after his career change, Fox has clearly mapped his own empty. "Once I started doing these projects -- and continued to write poetry and publish books of poetry -- I'd pretty thoroughly reinvented myself as a writer," Fox says.

Not, he's quick to point out, as an art critic, despite his proclivity to write about the stuff. "I certainly don't have the methodology to tackle art in an analytical way," he says now. "That's not what I'm trained to do and that's not my inclination." "Mapping the Empty" wasn't written from the seclusion of his own skull, but is based on interviews with the artists and weaves in ideas from his prodigious reading. "Driving By Memory" goes even farther down this pastiche road, incorporating Fox's family memories and episodes from his widely divergent experiences -- among other things, he's a seasoned mountaineer.

"I think the books are put together by drawing from a lot of different sources because that's how I actually function," he says. "I'm as interested to read the business section of the newspaper as I am the arts section.

"There's a great amount of art that has an intimate connection with the world. And that's the stuff I like to write about. So I like to look at the real world in the company of artists. Because I think that what they see, and how they see, helps instruct us to a wider viewpoint."

For all its tremendous personal satisfaction, that's obviously not a formula with "New York Times best-seller" written all over it. "I don't make a living by writing," he says frankly. He pulled down about $13,000 last year, maybe $6,000 the year before. He supplements it with small arts-consulting gigs and a big assist from his wife, Beth, a Los Angeles arts administrator. "If I didn't have a wife who's very supportive of what I'm doing, I wouldn't be able to do it at all," he says. "There aren't any large numbers being associated with these books." Not entirely true: As of Wednesday, "Driving By Memory" ranked No. 1,118,713 on Amazon.com's sales listing.

More Fox books: a list

* A collaboration with photographer Mark Klett, retracing the western travels of pioneering 19th century photographer Timothy O'Sullivan. Completed, awaiting publication.

* "The Void, the Grid and the Sign," further musings on Nevada land and landscape. "The void being the emptiness (of the desert) and the inability we have neurologically to perceive it correctly," Fox says. "For instance, when you go to the desert and there aren't a lot of strong verticals at predictable distances from you, you don't understand how far away things are, how large the environment is. That tends to uncouple us from reality. There's a sort of cognitive dissonance that exists in the desert. The book starts with that premise, that cognitive dissonance." Completed, awaiting publication.

* "I'm very slowly accumulating a set of essays about Las Vegas, towards a book. All of them are once again going to center on matters of art." Work in progress.

* A book about Antarctica, the world's largest desert. "I want to take my theory of cognitive dissonance and see how it works there." Still in planning stage.

More driving

As coordinator of the upcoming Western States Book Awards (held in May in San Francisco), Fox has traveled to Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, all in the last eight months.

Q: Are you tired of driving yet?

A: "No."

At last count

By the end of "Selected Overpasses," Fox has arrived in Las Vegas, worked his way through considerations of natural history, earthwork art and the meaning of interstate freeways, and still managed to keep counting. His final score: 73 overpasses, 20 trains, eight cops, two pedestrians and four roadkill.

Yet he regrets things untallied. "I can't tell you how many rivers, streams and washes I crossed," he writes, "the number of trucks, cars or even towns passed without referring to a map. Compared to desert tribespeople, I'm totally number impaired, unable to remember the number of strides between water holes. I've made notes and slash marks, have maps and guidebooks for reference, and I still won't get it all exactly correct." Don't let it put you off, Bill.

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