At the Lightning Field

An exploration of coincidences of history, light, space, duration, chaos theory, mathematics, memory, and Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field.

Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field is four hundred stainless steel poles, positioned two hundred and twenty feet apart, in the desert of central New Mexico. Over the course of several visits, it becomes, for Raicovich, a site for confounding and revealing perceptions of time, space, duration, and light; how changeable they are, while staying the same.

Publication date: April 11, 2017

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 4.5 x 7

Page count: 104 pages

ISBN: 9781566894661

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Laura Raicovich works as president and executive director of the Queens Museum. She is the author of A Diary of Mysterious Difficulties (Publication Studio), a book based on Viagra and Cialis spam, and is an editor of Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production (OR Books).

Finalist for the 2018 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards

“Make a pilgrimage to The Lightning Field by walking the lines of this book and building something beautiful in your mind’s eye with the author, who will take you there and many places besides.”

—Rebecca Solnit

“To read the book is to gain entry into a mind, its streaks and blazes, its patterns and rhythms, sometimes straightforward, sometimes oblique, with bolts of language that dazzle and linger in the mind like a strong light after you close your eyes.”

—The Boston Globe

“A beautifully chaotic map of thought and experience that both mirrors the experience of a work of art and probes its essence.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Into the slim gap between focus and abstraction, Raicovich slips a series of meditations on perceptions, causality, time, weather, and mathematics that have the syntax of a prose poem, the chronology and notation of a journal, and the cohesiveness of an essay.”

—Bookforum

“A surprising, nimble look at a notable work of art, as evocative and unpredictable as the most thought-provokingly conceptual works can be.” 

—Vol. 1 Brooklyn

“A beautiful example of a long essay that responds to a work of art in a uniquely linguistic manner, the sort of thing that I myself enjoy writing, and which I feel we should see more of from creative nonfiction writers.”

—Conversational Reading

“At the Lightning Field is very much in line with what I think writing can and should do around art . . .”

—ArtNews

“Laura Raicovich’s hauntingly evocative At the Lightning Field is not so much a work of criticism or art history as a veritably Rilkean exercise in co-presence, lyrically resonating, that is, off of the Rilke who spoke of ‘that love that consists in this, that two solitudes meet and touch and shelter one another.’”

—Lawrence Weschler

“Laura Raicovich's beautifully distilled and rigorously experimental book will inspire anyone wanting to learn how to take alert notes on an aesthetic experience and then how to transform those notes into complex verbal art.” 

—Wayne Koestenbaum