The Lightning Field, 140 characters at a time

To mark our e-book publication of The Lightning Field, by San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker, we're tweeting some Field facts and fancies over the next few days and into the summer. Join us at #lightningfield. If you've visited the work or read the book, we'd love to hear from you. Here's a little from what we've shared the first day:

#lightningfield is comprised of 400 stainless-steel poles arranged in a 1 kilometer x 1 mile grid, at intervals of 220 feet.

The distance around the outer edge of #lightningfield is 3.2427 miles, or about an hour's walk at an average pace.

Visiting each of #lightningfield's 220 poles, would require a walk of more than 16 miles!

The tops of the 400 2-inch-diameter stainless-steel poles form a flat, horizontal plain over the subtly changing landscape #lightningfield

The tallest pole is 26.72 ft, and the shortest is 15.07 ft. #lightningfield

32 companies and 26 people, including De Maria himself, are listed as having worked on the project. #lightningfield

The companies included Expert Machine Co. for the "machined tip" and Yellow Bird, Inc. for "helicopter service". #lightningfield

From the gazebo

Thomas Kinkade, "The Painter of Light" ™, Sweetheart GazeboIn the run-up to tomorrow's e-book release of Beauty is Convulsive by Carole Maso, I've been doing an increasing amount of research into and reading of art-related, or ekphrastic, poetry. In the long-term, we're on the look-out for more such poetry books to publish, and more ways to promote the books already out there. The meeting place of visual art and poetry is a growing and potentially intellectually (not financially) lucrative area of practice.

That said, the poetry book I'd like to give quick mention to now, Museum of Parallel Art, by Robert Wynne, stands out first for its whimsy. In it, Wynne uses each poem to consider a famous work of art as if it had been done be a radically different artist than the original: "Anne Geddes' Guernica", "Norman Rockwell's Saturn Devouring One Of His Children", "Piet Mondrian's Starry Night", etc... Even if it's a one-note idea, it's also in many ways a charming collection. What has stuck with me most since first reading it, however, are the opening lines to the poem "Thomas Kinkade's The Crucifixion", both horrifying and hilarious.

It's no surprise
the light shrouding

Jesus is beautiful
even as he dies,

but who knew
this took place

in a gazebo? 

What artist/artwork mash-ups would you propose?  The best, most meaningful of such pairings would transcend the basic novelty of "unlikely couples" and ideally offer new ways of seeing and thinking about each individually. It's definitely not as easy as it sounds at first. I'd like to think up a new artist for The Cremaster Cycle, but who? Instead, I think the best I've come up with so far is "Fred Sandback's Torqued Ellipse".

Share your ideas here, or better yet, maybe there's a Twitter meme to be started: #parallelart? #artmashup?