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Telephone Poles
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When people ask me what I write about, my favorite reply is "cognitive dissonance in isotropic spaces." I deploy such an alarming statement because it's accurate, but also because it usually induces curiosity, my favorite state of arousal for an audience. It all began innocently enough with my friend, the painter Mary Ann Bonjorni, telling me about counting telephone poles.

In the early 1990s I was writing a book about contemporary artists in Nevada, and I'd just finished an essay about Jim McCormick, a Reno printmaker who had assembled this astonishing topography at the University of Nevada art gallery out of 930 one-foot-square gridded blocks. The white blocks with their one-by-one-inch printed grids took up half of the gallery floor, and the audience sat in the black painted room to contemplate the basin and range of this situation. Between them and the landscape—because that's what it was, a landscape print, though not a traditional one—were small sculptures made to resemble surveying instruments.

Jim had moved to Reno from Tulsa in 1960 to join an art faculty still housed in quonset huts on campus, and he'd been struck dumb when he entered the Great Basin. If you're of average height, as is Jim, and live in a place as flat as Oklahoma, you can see about two miles in any given direction. That's sixteen square miles you can grasp visually. When he drove into Nevada on old Highway 40, he could see mountain ranges forty miles away, and suddenly he was looking at the boundaries surrounding 6,400 square miles. Between that apprehension of immense space, and what he called a "drought of color," he had come smack up against the inability of his mind to process land into landscape, of turning an unfamiliar space that looked much the same in all directions into a familiar place. He was, in short, experiencing cognitive dissonance in an isotropic space.

Human beings evolved over millions of years in the woodlands and savanna of temperate Africa, a terrain where there are trees to hide behind, and other trees close enough to us to run up into when we're being chased by something higher up the food chain than we are. We like to see a pond or stream in the midground of our vision because that's where we find water and food. We know how far everything is because we understand the length of our limbs in relationship to the limbs of the trees. And in the far background we like to see something that defines the horizon, preferably a mountain range that has gone blue and hazy in the distance—a shift in the spectrum caused by humidity in the atmosphere, an effect that Leonardo Da Vinci observed and then used in art for the first time in the background of the Mona Lisa.

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