How does 100 SUNS approach the landscape concepts of the beautiful and the sublime?
The book is about power and its seductions and terrors. Nuclear detonations invariably and disturbingly raise issues about beauty, the sublime and the created sublime, as well as a multitude of vital issues, like self-induced annihilation! It seems these issues of the sublime, power and violence function on natural and man-made levels throughout the work. It’s true that these elements pervade the book, and that they function on a multi-valent level. I think anyone doing serious contemporary landscape production has to deal with violence. The story of our country is incredibly violent, and what we are doing to the environment today is also extraordinarily violent. Do you see this as a general lack of regard for, and knowledge about, history? Absolutely. We build things, and we just as quickly—just as effectively—abandon them. Time and space in this country are manipulated without regard for our surroundings, which is one of the reasons why violence needs to be examined within a discussi
