The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society

Lippard (The Pink Glass Swan), an art writer whose work has appeared in the Village Voice, In these Times and the Nation, has lived a multicentered life. She has migrated from New England to New Orleans to New York City and now divides her time between Galisteo, N.Mex., and Georgetown, Maine. But her book is also multicentered and in her eagerness to address many worthy issues, she has overburdened and diluted it. ""This book is not concerned with the history of nature and the landscape but with the historical narrative as it is written in the landscape or place by the people who live or lived there""--a very broad mission. In her discussions of maps as a reflection of culture, of place names, of the meaning of a place for exiles and for those longtime descendants, of the manipulation of history, Lippard is an insightful thinker, happily free of most jargon. She is also a wide reader who brings to the discussion entirely apt ideas not only from writers like Jean Baudrillard, Yi-fu Tuan and Howard Kuntsler or Gary Snyder and John Muir, but also from Langston Hughes, Larry McMurtry, Linda Hogan and other writers, artists and local residents. Her sections on the politics of archaeology, on the environment and on site-specific art are good, but it is here that the bagginess of the thesis is most evident. A bi- or even tripartite structure makes the book seem even more diffuse: accompanying the main text, is a running, related narrative of Georgetown where she has returned every summer for 60 years, and 150 images with lengthy captions that parallel the text. (Aug.)