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Drive for hours through the high desert of New Mexico, cross the Continental Divide, and fetch up in the tiny town of Quemado. Go past the adobe brick church and the Christmas tree, constructed of elkhorn, at the Chevron station. Park across from the bar, closed because the proprietor is keeping "hunter's hours."
Wait. After a while, a van will pull up. Get in. The driver, who says his name is Robert, will know the way, but as soon as the van turns off the paved road you will be hopelessly lost, disoriented in a seemingly featureless landscape of scrubby grass and barbed wire fencing. After almost an hour, when the van pulls up at a tiny cabin, get out. Watch Robert drive away, leaving you and your five fellow travelers alone under a vast blue sky.
But not quite alone. Behind you is "The Lightning Field," an enormous and astonishing installation of 400 lightning rods, a work of art so immense and so changeable that is occupies the desert landscape like a living thing. The mystery of the road trip and the enforced isolation are all part of getting to know it.
"The sum of the facts does not constitute the work or determine its aesthetics," Walter De Maria, the creator of "The Lightning Field," writes in a notebook, kept in a ring binder at the cabin. But here are the facts: The installation, completed in 1977, comprises 400 highly polished stainless steel poles with pointed tips, set 220 feet apart, in a grid. Because the land undulates slightly, the poles vary in height: the shortest is 15 feet and the longest is 26 feet 9 inches. The tips of all of them lie on a plane; a giant pane of glass could rest on all of them.
The grid is 25 poles (5,280 feet, or one mile) long and 16 poles (3,300 feet, or one kilometer) wide, and it takes about two hours to walk the perimeter, which was the first thing we set out to do. It was midafternoon, and the sun had already moved around toward the west. But the September daylight was still strong enough to hide the poles from us as we viewed them from the cabin. They faded into the mountains in the distance.
Once we got into the grid, though, everything changed. Depending on where you were, and how fast you were moving, the poles came and went in your line of sight, in constantly shifting patterns and rhythms.
Close up, there were wildflowers - apricot mallow, purple asters, wild sunflowers and broom - and abundant wildlife in the form of ants that have constructed numerous hills, a few feet in diameter and up to two feet high, all over the site. (They left us alone.) But it was hard to pay much mind to flora and fauna. The liquid landscape of the rods held all our attention.
"The land is not the setting for the work but a part of the work," Mr. De Maria writes in the cabin notebook. He and his assistants - Robert Fosdick and Helen Winkler were the principal associates - scoured California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and Texas by truck over five years before settling on the site, 11½ miles east of the Continental Divide, elevation 7,200 feet.
From the rough porch of the cabin, "The Lightning Field" is set off against mountains rising miles away to the south. As the sun moves across the sky, particularly at dawn or dusk, waves of color sweep across the rods in continually changing golds, reds and blues.
Lightning must occur within about 200 feet of the installation, Mr. De Maria says in his notebook, before it can "feel" the poles and come down to earth there, something he says happens about 60 times a year, most often in August and September, when storms are most common. We visited in late September, on a calm almost cloudless night. So we did not experience the violent beauty of lighting crashing down in front of us. Instead, we had the moon. We were not disappointed.
The six of us - five people from Santa Fe and I, a friend of one of them - arrived in late afternoon, with just enough time to walk the perimeter and venture here and there into the installation. But by the time we had settled into the rough wooden chairs on the plank porch, "The Lightning Field" was ready to offer up its magic.
Seen from the porch, the rods marched away in phalanxes to the south. As the sun sank over our right shoulders, the metal spikes started to glow in the golden light. Their pointed tips took fire first, like candles, but soon the spikes themselves lighted up, top to bottom, as if glowing from within.
"This is like a sea, and these ships are moving in the distance" one of us said. "They look like centurions coming at you," said another. "They look like those golden soldiers from Xian, like grave markers, almost like raindrops, like the Roman armies."
For me, it was as if a piece of formal music, a Bach invention, perhaps, had taken material form and was playing before my eyes, not my ears. "You can make up stories for every row," one of us observed, and she was right.
As an almost full moon rose, we sat on the porch and sipped our wine, captivated by what lay before us.
"The Lightning Field" is supported by the Dia Art Foundation, which came into being in 1974 and which focuses, more or less, on the work of relatively few artists - usually in isolated installations maintained for the long term - or, as Dia itself puts it, on "art projects whose nature and scale exceed the limits normally available within the traditional museum or gallery."
Mr. De Maria is one of their major contributors and Dia maintains several of his works. One is the strangely captivating "Earth Room," "an interior earth sculpture" - a 3,600-square-foot loft filled to a depth of 22 inches with 250 cubic yards of dirt - at 141 Wooster Street in New York. Another is "The Broken Kilometer, strands of metal, a kilometer in total, laid out in segments on the floor of a loft space at 393 West Broadway. But there are plenty of other Dia sites, by Mr. De Maria and others.
All the Dia installations I have seen stun those who encounter them with their wild artistic ambition and their imaginative flights. They hold the gaze. "The Lighting Field" does the same, and then some. Its enormous size and its vast setting compel reflection on the nature of nature and what it means to make art in a natural environment.
Mr. De Maria, a Berkeley-trained painter who was born in California in 1935, was a pioneer in what came to be known as land art, the use of bulldozers and other equipment to excavate and shape works in isolated landscapes, many in the American West. (He was also at one time, it seems, a drummer for the Velvet Underground.)
Distance and nature are his media at the Lightning Field. "Isolation is the sense of land art," Mr. De Maria says in the cabin notebook, and isolation was one of the major criteria he established when he began looking for a site in 1971.
The notebook describes how Mr. De Maria and his helpers, traveling by truck, traversed the outback regions of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and Texas before settling on this parcel.
It took years to complete the installation, which Dia financed. The steel rods had to be fabricated, cut to the proper size, shaped and polished. Each is set in its own concrete footing, three feet deep and one foot in diameter, buried one foot beneath the surface. They are designed to survive winds of up to 110 miles an hour.
The installation is intended to be viewed in isolation or with a very small group of people, Mr. De Maria writes. So the cabin on the site, in serious disrepair when the project began, has been restored to accommodate six people at most.
Its fittings are spartan but adequate. There are three bedrooms (one with a double bed, two with two twins each) a common room furnished with rough-hewn chairs, a small wood stove and dining table, and a small kitchen equipped with no-nonsense dishes, glasses and so on.
Food provided by Lightning Field was waiting for us in the cabin, but on our visit it was bland vegetarian fare, so we were glad we had brought our own dinner and breakfast fixings and drinks. It was the wine - or rather what turned out to be our inadequate supply - that taught us the wisdom of L.F.'s practice of leaving visitors carless in the desert. If we had had a car, we realized the next morning, someone would surely have struck out in search of more provisions, a venture that might have ended in disaster in the night and which would certainly have destroyed the mood.
Sleep came easily in the cool desert air and the light barely woke us in time to watch "The Lightning Field" come to life as a pink sunrise sent waves of color through the installation. In its own way, sunrise at Lightning Field was as spectacular as sunset had been.
We cooked our breakfast and some of us took mugs of coffee and tea as we strolled through the site one last time, as the rods faded again in the strengthening sunlight.
Then Robert returned with the van and we headed back to a world far less filled with magic.
Visitor Information
You must make a reservation for "The Lightning Field" months in advance and plan to stay overnight. This is not a place for drive-through viewing, even if it were allowed and you could find it on your own.
The cabin accommodates six people in three bedrooms, two with twin beds, one with a double. There are two bathrooms, a kitchen and a common room. Simple vegetarian food is left there for you, but you can bring your own. Rates are $110 a person in May, June, September and October, and $135 a person in July and August. The student rate is $85 and discounts are available for children, but only if visitors reserve the entire cabin.
Visitors should arrive at Quemado by 2:30 on the day they have reserved. They will be met there and transported to the installation. Quemado is about a two-and-a-half or three-hour drive from Albuquerque.
"The Lightning Field" is open May 1 through Oct. 31, seven days a week. Additional information is available from the Dia Art Foundation at Corrales, N.M., at www.lightningfield.org or at (505) 898-3335.
Though "The Lightning Field" is almost by definition in the middle of nowhere, there are fascinating places to visit en route.
By CORNELIA DEAN, a fellow at the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, is on leave from The Times.
This article appeared on September 22, 2003 in The New York Times.