Protestors dressed as cartoon tigers[1] infiltrated Exxon’s Irving, Texas headquarters, climbing to the roof, unfurling a banner declaring the building a “CLIMATE CHANGE CRIME SCENE” and then played two-hand touch using a globe as the football.[2] In a coordinated effort, other members of Greenpeace, driving rented Jaguars, breached the gates and launched an inflatable raft onto the corporate pond, eluding security guards for hours. The protest aimed to call out Exxon for its deliberate role in environmental damage and insistence on running interference in the climate change debate.[3] Fittingly, the company's 300-acre campus is located in the vastly deteriorated Texas Blackland Prairie, one of the world's most endangered large ecosystems.[4]
It is well documented that George W. Bush’s epochal 2000 campaign was awash in Exxon cash, so it is a poignant coincidence that his Presidential Library would find its home on the same collapsed prairie. Adjacent to the George W. Bush Library and Museum is the Native Texas Park, a 15-acre park designed to mimic, or stage, the Texas landscape, which has been "closely identified"[5] with Bush. The Native Texas Park has been a locus in my broader exploration for meaning within the seemingly indecipherable landscape of North Texas. This essay, written in an acrostic format, uses the park as an axis mundi, linking a prairie, a presidency, and a land art proposal—to prod at the tangle of politics and symbol embedded in a performative landscape. The inquiry starts by asking whether the Native Texas Park at the George W. Bush Library truly represents a prairie.
Timothy Morton discusses the fuzziness of ecological boundaries in the book Dark Ecology. Here, they introduce the sorites paradox[6] and the problem of heaps. Imagine, if you will, a prairie in its unadulterated form, brimming with the intricate dance of species, the rich tapestry of natural soil, the silent, relentless engine of evolution. Start tweaking this landscape—subtract a species here, a soil type there—and a philosophical puzzle emerges: at what juncture does it stop being a prairie? Conversely, construct a prairie from the ground up, adding elements piece by piece, and another question arises: when does it transition into a prairie? Through these thought experiments, Morton arrives at a deceptively simple yet subversive conclusion: prairies, in the absolute sense, never existed.[7]
With its hall-of-mirrors quality, this argument confronts our perceptions of nature, countries, presidencies, and the language we use to categorize and understand them. Viewed through this lens, the park is emancipated from being a facsimile of nature and transcends beyond the reenactment of a nonexistent past. Perhaps it could help us to approach an ecology of the real and embrace what Robert Smithson called the “contradictions that inhabit our landscapes.”[8] It feels imperative to pass through this meta-texture of conflicting horizons to find our footing in these strange territories.
Resting on the meticulously manicured grounds of Southern Methodist University is the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum. The building sprawls over 226,000 square feet, its exterior a blend of Texas limestone and glass—architect Robert A.M. Stern's ode, perhaps, to the state's rugged grandeur and the transparent candor often associated with its namesake president? I have often observed that the building feels more like a rich kid’s high school than a library.
Tucked behind the main building lies an ambitious piece of landscape architecture designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. Costing $ 40 million to construct and roughly half a million a year to maintain, it provides a pastoralizing, idealized diorama showcasing an ecological simulacrum of the North Texan landscape and its native flora.
A mile of manicured trails cuts efficiently through the park, doing their best to protect sightlines from high-rise buildings that loom across the highway. Gently shaped into a bowl, the grounds are an exercise in aesthetics and functionality. This design serves a practical purpose—channeling rainwater into a central cistern—while forming an acoustic barrier against the chirp of adjacent sports fields and dampening the dull roar of the North Central Expressway just over the wall at the edge of the property.
Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates have also produced suites of renders for park projects in the federally controlled Dallas Floodway. As any Dallasite knows, the Army Corps of Engineers has consistently rejected the city's half-baked plans on the flood-prone Trinity River. Yet the promise of a Trinity mega-park seems to hang around. The Dallas Floodway: nature turned infrastructure, turned vapor-ware paradise is always just about to break ground after the next fundraiser.
Local artist Tino Ward, a pseudonym derived from reversing the letters "draw on it," often visits the floodway following heavy rainfall. There, he collects small pieces of debris that have been swept into the area by prairie run-off. These twisted pieces of flotsam often find their way into his artwork, either incorporated into cast paper sculptures or painted with vibrant, psychedelic patterns that resemble visual auras. Tino's work captures not just physical remnants but also seems to channel the dreams and myths swirling through the Metroplex, carried along by the waters to this damp, grassy space. His actions are both a form of archaeological discovery and a gesture of care. By picking up in the Floodway, even if only symbolically, Tino transfigures trash into the modest act of art making.
America “is a giant hologram, in the sense that information concerning the whole is contained in each of its elements,” and here, “things seem to be made of a more unreal substance.”[9] In Dallas, the Capitol of Panem, and a mecca for plastic surgery, the Native Texas Park has become a place of “urban beauty by landscape surgery.”[10] George W. Bush is also made of this “more unreal substance.” As Diane Rubenstein observes, “One could read the embodiment of toughness in his extensive accessorizing: cowboy boots and Oval Office belt buckle, flight suit, pickup truck, and an entire ranch in Crawford.”[11] President as Ken Doll, Action Figure, or Regional Theater Actor. Similarly, Barthes observes about professional wrestlers that their costuming and physique “establishes a basic sign containing in germ the whole fight.”[12]
At the Native Texas Park, this manicured nature serves a dual purpose: it is both an educational tool and a symbolic link for Bush to Texas, his adopted home state, despite his birthplace in New Haven, Connecticut. The park's serene artificiality reflects Bush’s crafted image as a Texan rancher (not big on horses), a narrative woven into his political identity. Like Melvin P. Thorpe in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, to Bush, “Texas suits my style…”[13]
The building's imposing footprint, combined with the signal of the Native Texas Park's nature, creates a space that is at once a tribute to presidential history and a subtle commentary on the nature of political image-making. Much like its surrounding park, the library becomes a stage (replica of the Oval Office) where the narrative of a presidency is perpetually reenacted. It is a place where history is preserved on large touchscreen displays, in a sense, idealized.
The library tells of a time when late-night talk show hosts made easy jokes about “hanging chads” and “electile dysfunction,” where America and the world found themselves at a crossroads. Neither man was particularly inspiring, both failing “to sustain the imaginary identification of elected leadership,”[14] and they were almost Dickensian in their clear-cut climate opposition. On one side stood Albert Arnold Gore Jr., a candidate who had already begun to carry the mantle of global warming as if it were his personal cross to bear. Opposite him was George W. Bush, scion of an oil dynasty, whose environmental leanings were, to put it mildly, less pronounced. Bush would prevail, and a notable cairn on our current path came in March 2001, when the US announced its withdrawal from the Kyoto Treaty.
The man we inherited from this election shines most true as Will Ferrell’s George W. Bush for Saturday Night Live. A clueless, shoot-from-the-hip Texan whose punch lines often included malapropisms and mispronunciations ("strategery"). With his narrow eyes and cocky demeanor, Ferrell adroitly embodied what Bob Woodward called W.’s secular faith in his gut: “his instincts are almost his second religion.”[15] In many ways, W. was a perfect character for Ferrell’s comedic persona of the overly confident, erratic authority figure (Get off the shed!) who desperately tries to compensate for his own intellectual impotence with an excess of performative masculinity (Anchorman).
A decade earlier, Dana Carvey's portrayal of George H.W. Bush, blending exaggerated mannerisms like awkward gestures, a nasal voice, and large glasses with catchphrases such as "Not gonna do it, wouldn't be prudent," crafted an image of the 41st President as a well-meaning but somewhat out-of-touch statesman. This comedic representation also underscored the idiosyncrasies and underlying narratives of his presidency, particularly highlighting Bush Sr.’s perceived lack of forcefulness compared to Ronald Reagan, his former boss. Known affectionately as “Poppy” by his children, the elder Bush’s perceived softer demeanor and alleged inefficacy, especially in the context of his dealings with Saddam Hussein, created tension between him and his son W., who would later aim to “finish the job” in a contrasting presidential style.
Ferrell’s portrayal of George W. Bush, with over-the-top bravado and frequent gaffes, seemed to underscore a son's attempt to be the antithesis of his father's perceived weaknesses, especially in the realm of foreign policy and military might. The Junior Bush administration seemed focused on settling old scores by planting appointees with roots in past administrations. As Rubenstein notes, this “Back to the Future cabinet”[16] saw the return of heirloom figures from Bush Sr.'s tenure, like Powell and Rice, alongside zombies of the Nixon/Ford era, such as Cheney and Rumsfeld. The administration embarked on a mission to bolster the battlements of the executive branch's power, drawing lessons from the reservoir of shortcomings from the Nixon and Bush Sr. presidencies by tapping into the principles of the unitary executive theory.[17] The introduction of this exotic species has insidiously woven itself into the fabric of our present, influencing contemporary debates on the scope and boundaries of presidential authority.
Ipomopsis rubra, Standing Cypress, or Red Texas Star, is tall and slender, with red speckled flowers that cluster at the tips of fern-like foliage. When I first encountered them at the George W. Bush Library, they were planted in large hunks near the park's center. The golden hour light brought a slight breeze, and the red flowers, an array of tiny, fiery trumpets, swayed in a flamboyant wave while a hummingbird darted from throat to throat.
The Native Texas Park and, by extension, the plants within it exist in a state of ecological theater. This garden thrives not because of the resilience of its inhabitants but due to continuous, invisible stewardship.[18] Like the paradise-adjacent realm in the Twilight Zone episode “A Nice Place to Visit,” the park is engineered for unending success, and its uncanniness can feel both pleasurable and sort of eerie.
Part of that eeriness might come from the vexing presence of the word “Native” embedded in the park's nomenclature. This word, like a pebble in the shoe, surfaces caverns of complicated ideas about Indigenous heritage, annexation, and histories of segregation and violence. It is as though the park, with its vibrancy and verdure, hosts a grinning erasure of those uncomfortable histories by presenting itself as a false baseline before there were issues—a paradise lost.
When first touring the Clymer Meadow, a managed Texas Blackland Prairie remnant in Celeste, Texas (often championed as the real deal prairie), I was struck by the density and diversity of plant life per square foot. In a Blackland prairie, multiple life cycles are apparent all around you, blooming and fallow, a mosh pit of emergence and gentle decay. The weight on your legs as you press and crunch forward through the tangle is wholly unique. As Matt White observes in Prairie Time, while you speak of being on a prairie, in reality, “to know the prairie you have to go into it.”[19]
Prairie is plural, perhaps a poster child for Donna Haraway's multispecies entanglement[20] that has evolved into a clock of interdependence. So much is unseen. Deep in the soil are grubs, bugs, bacteria, mycorrhizal fungi, and highways of prairie roots, some delving as deep as the height of a basketball hoop is tall. This lattice of roots creates a natural matrix that supports ecological balance, distributes nutrients and water, and prevents erosion.
In the Native Texas Park, the erosion problem has been addressed by using Geofibers. Part of a broader category known as geosynthetics, Geofibers are used in civil engineering for soil stabilization. These spindly bits of fibers are mixed in the ground to mimic the subterranean mesh of the original prairie. The Petro-Presidency yielded a plastic prairie. The notion of simulation and artifice here resonates intriguingly with the broader narrative of George W. Bush's presidency. His tenure, marked by debates over authenticity, perception, and reality—think weapons of mass destruction, ”Mission Accomplished,” the financial crisis—finds its echo in the park.
Robert Smithson famously consulted on the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport (DFW) design at the behest of the engineering and architectural firm Tippetts-Abbett-McCarthy-Stratton (TAMS). Between 1966 and 1967, he met with engineers and architects planning the world's largest airport at the time. While TAMS would eventually lose the bid for the project, leaving Smithson’s ideas unrealized, the artist was prolific in spinning both myth and proposal materials. Today, his ideas pulse through a network of interconnected drawings, essays, models, and interviews.[21]
Smithson’s essay "Aerial Art," published in Studio International in 1969, laid out ideas for huge earthworks installations by himself and others. The essay contains a description of a suite of prairie pieces by Supergroup Smithson-LeWitt-Andre-Morris:[22]
A. ROBERT MORRIS
His proposal is an “earth mound” circular in shape and trapezoidal in cross section. Its surface would be sod, and its radius might be extended as much as a thousand feet—easily viewed from arriving and departing aircraft.
B. CARL ANDRE
A crater formed by a one-ton bomb dropped from 10,000 feet.
or
An acre of blue-bonnets (state flowers of Texas).
C. ROBERT SMITHSON
A progression of triangular concrete pavements that would result in a spiral effect. This could be built as large as the site would allow, and could be seen from approaching and departing aircraft.
D. SOL LEWITT
His proposal is “non-visual” and involves the substratum of the site. He emphasizes the “concept” of art rather than the “object” that results from its practice. The precise spot in the site would not be revealed—and would consist of a small cube of unknown contents cast inside a larger cube of concrete. The cube would then be buried in the earth.
“What was to be ‘the biggest airport in the world’ became a speck in the Texas prairie.” - Robert Smithson[23]
In Smithson’s vision for the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport during the late 1960s, there lurked an engagement with a concept that wouldn't be neatly defined until decades later: the hyperobject, a term coined by philosopher Timothy Morton. A hyperobject, nested in Morton’s poetic loom of thought and reference, refers to entities so massively distributed in time and space that they transcend localization—think climate change, the internet, or the War on Terror. In his proposal, Smithson was wrestling with an embryonic form of a hyperobject: the burgeoning infrastructure of mass air travel, the jumbo-jet, the Concorde supersonic jet—a phenomenon characterized by its scale, speed, and sprawling impact, certainly teeming with the glimmering spectacle of the new for the artist.
In fact, this proposal placed Smithson’s ideas in the midst of another hyperobject, the Texas Blackland Prairie. The TBP, even in its degraded state, is a distributed ecoregion, spreading from the Red River to San Antonio. It is also an ecosystem almost invisible in its subtlety, teeming with micro-organisms and the nuanced interplay between flora and fauna. Into this whisper, Smithson proposed large interventions that echoed the mystery and immutable witness of ancient earthwork (i.e., mounds, lines, megaliths). The airport proposals encapsulate a meditation on this deeper time, immortalizing the entropic decay in nature and human history (mirrored in the prairies and presidencies) and winking at the inevitabilities of existence. For the transient traveler—perpetually arriving, departing, ascending, descending—“from the shrinking terminal to the obstructing clouds,”[24] these forms presented fleeting glimpses of the alien and monumental amid the mundane.
There's something inherently elusive about the name “Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport,” a title that hovers in a semantic limbo. The awkward conurbation is the culmination of a protracted saga of negotiation, a bureaucratic ballet for federal aviation funds between the rival neighbors Dallas and Fort Worth. The compromise was a fuzzy geographic midpoint that situated the airport squarely in the midst of a sprawling 30-square-mile tract of cattle and open sky.
The location of DFW is a study in stacked liminality. It is not just a simple case of being in two places at once—although it does straddle Dallas and Tarrant Counties—it also simultaneously occupies portions of Irving, Grapevine, Coppell, and Euless. To Smithson, an airport creates a reality where “all dimension seems to be lost... you are really going from some place to some place, which is to say nowhere in particular.”[25] During the four-day inauguration of the airport, a promotional photograph was taken that captures a young boy astride a pony in what appears to be a pastoral idyll, set against the incongruous backdrop of the Concorde—that sleek, supersonic emblem of modernity—soaring skyward, collapsing time and space in the prairie.
In 1973, the North Texas Commission (NTC) introduced “Metroplex,” a blend of “metropolis” and “complex” as an alternative to the hyphenated surname of Dallas-Fort Worth. It never caught on and was tacked to the back of the garble bus, creating the term Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. This name Metroplex, as unwieldy and artificial as it seems, captures something essential about the nature of Dallas and its near-constant penchant for a grandiose, if sometimes hollow, push for reinvention.
This confusion of place resonates with the Bush Library's location in the Park Cities of Dallas. An island of affluence, the Park Cities are simultaneously part of and distinct from the city itself. To use their separated form, Highland Park and University Park present a curious study of urban isolationism and exclusivity. Conceived initially as separate towns in the early 20th century, these neighborhoods were designed to be bastions of a certain upper-crust ideal. Think tree-lined streets, meticulously manicured lawns, and architecture that ranges from the charmingly historic to the ostentatiously mutant.
This is not just a community; it's a statement of identity, a declaration of difference. In their quest for suburban utopia, the Park Cities have created a socio-urban paradox. On the one hand, they are inextricably linked to Dallas—relying on its infrastructure, economy, and cultural offerings. Yet, on the other hand, they maintain staunch independence with their own government, services, and, perhaps most tellingly, their own school district. No invasives.
Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s tragic significance to the George W. Bush Library lies in the information—or rather, misinformation—that he provided while under duress. It was his coerced testimony, extracted in the depths of torment, that US officials used as a key piece of evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq. As we are off-handedly reminded in the library, the assertion that Saddam Hussein's regime was linked to Al-Qaeda and possessed weapons of mass destruction was pivotal in garnering public and political support for the war. It was, of course, later proven false. This dark saga, where tortured confessions were transmuted into casus belli, highlights the treacherous nature of intelligence gleaned under such circumstances.
In the course of his “rendition” (apprehension and extrajudicial transfer of a person from one country to another for the purpose of interrogation), he was lost by US security forces. There were rumors that he was shipped to Egypt, where he was buried alive up to his neck in sand, an ancient, almost biblical form of torture. The psychological impact of such an experience is unimaginable, and it was widely speculated that Al-Libi's mind, subjected to such extremities of fear and despair, frayed and unraveled under the strain.[26] He later died in captivity.
Robert Smithson, whose proposal for DFW included not just earthworks but a kind of surveillance apparatus, observed how important the DFW project was to his artistic development. “I got interested in the earthworks as a result of that airport project. The Nonsites came as a result of my thinking about putting large-scale earthworks out on the edge of the airfield, and then I thought, how can I transmit that into the center?”[27] In his text “Aerial Art,” he calls for an airport gallery or, as he scratched on a map of the terminal, a “TERMINAL TV MUSEUM” exhibiting live footage of the various earthworks interspersed with footage of airplanes taking off and landing. This exploration of doubling the artwork as both a physical entity and a mediated image also refracts notions of the prairie as a specter in a ghost ecology (a prairie/non-prairie dialectic).
This concept of surveillance upon the earthworks conjures the policies enacted during the Bush administration post-9/11, marked by heightened security and an increased emphasis on electronic monitoring. Patriot Act, Expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), No Fly Lists, TSA, Homeland Security, etc. In the wake of the seismic events of September 11, 2001, a vast and intricate root system began to spread beneath the surface of US national security policy.
A system colloquially known as the “threat matrix” became the fulcrum around which a spectrum of anti-terrorist actions pivoted. It was not just a tool; it was a living, breathing organism that fed and grew on intelligence, both solid and suspect, and, in turn, metastasized into an increasingly aggressive series of policies under the Bush administration.
Central to this sprawling network was the practice of extraordinary rendition (Willy Wonka language). Between 2001 and 2005, over 150 individuals were plucked from various global locations and funneled through this subterranean matrix to “dark sites.” These renditions were like the tendrils of the system reaching out across the globe, ensnaring those deemed threats and pulling them into an underworld of interrogation and detention, far removed from the public eye and, crucially, from the reach of traditional legal protections.
Exit strategy? Carl Andre's contribution to Smithson’s plan—either a bomb crater or a field of Texas bluebonnets—has largely been seen as a commentary on the Vietnam War. It could also serve as an apt metaphor for the contradiction and complexity of the US war efforts in Afghanistan. The aftermath of 9/11 required a revenge spectacle to quench America’s blind rage. As Žižek observed at the time, Afghanistan was an ideal target because it was “already reduced to rubble, with no infrastructure, repeatedly destroyed by war for the last two decades.”[28] Enter Respected Mr. Flower.
Gul Agha Sherzai, an anti-Taliban warlord, gained prominence in the 1990s after the death of his father, Haji Latif. Known as the "Lion of Kandahar," Latif was a once-renowned mujahed. In adopting the surname "Sherzai," which means "Son of the Lion," Gul Agha sought to simultaneously carry on and instrumentalize his father's legacy. Interestingly, his first name, "Gul Agha," translates to "Respected Mr. Flower," presenting a stark contrast to his martial lineage.[29]
Mr. Flower’s ascent was sharp and fast, beginning with his contracting support for the Kandahar Airfield and other US installations. With the tremendous markups that are commonly associated with the military, he would take his massive profits to diversify into “gasoline and water distribution, real estate, taxi services, mining, and most lucrative of all, opium.”[30] Sherzai would also go on to use his growing wealth and influence to build a private security force.
The Afghanistan campaign for the US, ostensibly aimed at dismantling Al-Qaeda and uprooting the Taliban, had, in its early stages, achieved a semblance of its objectives. Yet, the American directive was to defeat terrorism, so the US military continued to look for it. Recognizing this, Sherzai weaponized his relationships with the US to manufacture enemies for them, and “his personal feuds and jealousies were repackaged as ‘counterterrorism.’”[31] In many cases, Sherzai and his men would arrest the same men over and over again, filling the prisons with what were essentially extras in the war on terrorism’s made-for-TV movie.
“Is this not the truth behind the fact that Bin Laden and the Taliban emerged as part of the CIA-supported anti-Soviet guerrilla movement in Afghanistan and behind the fact that Noriega in Panama was an ex-CIA agent? Is not the USA fighting its own excess in all these cases?” — Slavoj Žižek[32]
In this context, the figure of Sherzai and others like him reflect this dark chapter in the American intervention full of misdirected strategies, short-sighted policies, and a profound underestimation of the complexities of Afghan society. Building both prairies and nations is difficult. Sherzai was not merely a beneficiary of American largesse—dazzle capitalism’s henchman exploiting a seemingly limitless amount of money—but also a manifestation of a war effort tinged with malaise and autofiction.
Tora Bora (“Black Cave”) is a complex of natural and man-made fortifications in the Spin Ghar (“White Mountain”) mountain range near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The fortification was initially constructed with CIA funding for the mujahideen after the Soviet invasion in 1979. During the early days of the Afghan War, the caves were believed to be the hiding place of Osama bin Laden. In the popular imagination, they were depicted as an almost mythic fortress: a labyrinthine, impregnable hideout replete with its own power system, elaborate defenses, and accommodations for a sizable contingent.
The image, resembling something from a boy's dreams, was a blend of misinformation and convenient fiction. One depiction, first published in the Times of London on November 29, 2001, gained enough traction to reach the highest levels of government. Subsequently, on December 2, during an episode of NBC's Meet The Press, host Tim Russert presented Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with this artist's rendering, to which he responded, “This is serious business. And there's not one of those. There are many of those. And they have been used very effectively. And I might add, Afghanistan is not the only country that has gone underground. Any number of countries have gone underground. The tunneling equipment that exists today is very powerful. It's dual use. It's available across the globe. And people have recognized the advantages of using underground protection for themselves.”[33]
The conceptualization of the underground fortress evokes the artistic visions of Robert Smithson, particularly reminiscent of his sketches for DFW terminals, but also other projects like Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) or the unrealized Cinema Cavern (1971).[34] Additionally, this subterranean mystery echoes Sol LeWitt's proposal for the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, where he envisioned a cube buried within another cube, hidden deep underground. As noted by friend Jana La Brasca, this form can be seen as a nod to the hypercube, or tesseract. A structure that twists and turns in a mesmerizing optical illusion, creating a realm where reality is as elusive and difficult to pin down as the shifting shadows in a cave.
[1] A reference to the former ExxonMobil mascot and slogan, Put a Tiger in your Tank!
[2] This Greenpeace action happened in 2003. Steve Coll, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), 186.
[3] Exxon’s own internal modeling reflected its carbon emission impact beginning in the 1970’s. Alice McCarthy, "Exxon disputed climate findings for year…”The Harvard Gazette, January 12, 2023, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-analysis-finds-exxonmobil-internal-research-accurately-predicted-climate-change/.
[4] Less than .6% of remnant prairie remains.
[5] The full quote, “The design of the landscape of the George W. Bush Center began with the idea that, in the popular imagination, the President is closely identified with the native Texas Landscape,” comes from a self published booklet by the George W. Bush Library called The Landscapes of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, 5.
[6] An ancient paradox dealing with vague predicates: in essence, it questions how many grains of sand can be removed from a heap before it stops being a “heap.”
[7] Morton actually uses a meadow as his analogy, considering if you remove or add pieces of a meadow, when does it become or not become a meadow? In conclusion, “There is no single, independent, definable point at which the meadow stops being meadow, so there are no meadows. They might as well be parking lots waiting to happen.” Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 72-73.
[8] “The authentic artist cannot turn his back on the contradictions that inhabit our landscapes.” In the essay Smithson is examining how Olmsted's landscape designs for Central Park represent a dialogue between the natural and artificial, and pushes back against false ideas of an idealized nature. Robert Smithson, "Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape," in The Writings of Robert Smithson: Essays with Illustrations, ed. Nancy Holt (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 123.
[9] Jean Baudrillard, America (London: Verso, 2010), 29.
[11] Diane Rubenstein, This Is Not a President: Sense, Nonsense, and the American Political Imaginary (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 192.
[12] Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 6.
[13] In "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas," Melvin P. Thorpe, played by Dom DeLuise, hosts a sensationalist TV show called the "Watchdog Report," which is instrumental in exposing the activities at the Chicken Ranch (a brothel), leading to its eventual closure. Despite his drawl and Texas regalia, Thorpe reveals that he is actually from New Jersey, adding a layer of irony to his character's crusade to uncover the truth.
[15] Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 342.
[17] The unitary executive theory is a controversial and terrifying concept in constitutional law used in the post 9/11 Bush Administration that argues for an absolute executive power vested in the President of the United States.
[18] Historically, Indigenous peoples are believed to have been active stewards of the Texas Blackland Prairie. They maintained and revitalized the landscape using controlled burns, a practice that mimicked the natural effects of lightning-induced fires. This not only preserved the health of the prairies but also created ideal hunting conditions. In discussions about prairies, it is important to acknowledge this distinction, as it highlights the legacy of the prairie as a cultivated environment.
[19] Matt White, Prairie Time: A Blackland Portrait (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013), 19.
[20] In Staying with the Trouble, Haraway discusses the concept of multispecies entanglement, which refers to the deep, intricate, and interdependent relationships between human and non-human species. Haraway emphasizes the need for a new kind of thinking and living that acknowledges these complex connections, challenging traditional notions of individualism and emphasizing collective survival and flourishing in a rapidly changing ecological world. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
[21] Much of this research comes from an essay I published with the Holt/Smithson Foundation, “Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport Project, 1966-67,” in 2024.
[22] Robert Smithson, “Aerial Art,” Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings ed. Jack Flam (University of California Press, 1996), 116.
[23] Robert Smithson, letter of July 31, 1970 to Rolf-Dieter Herrmann in Rolf-Dieter Herrmann, “In
Search of a Cosmological Dimension, Robert Smithson’s Dallas-Fort Worth Airport Project,” Arts Magazine 3 no. 9, May 1978, 111.
[24] Smithson, “Aerial Art,” 116.
[25] Robert Smithson, “Fragments of an Interview with P. A. Norvell, April, 1969,” in Six Years, ed. Lucy R. Lippard (University of California Press, 1997), 90.
[26] Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 108.
[27] “Four Conversations between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson (1969-1970),” Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings ed. Jack Flam (University of California Press, 1996), 211-212.
[28] Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London: Verso, 2013), 43.
[29] Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2014), 108.
[33] Edward Jay Epstein, "Fictoid #3: The Lair of bin Laden'" accessed January 4, 2024, https://www.edwardjayepstein.com/nether_fictoid3.htm.
[34] These ideas also resemble Smithson’s dialectic of site/non-site, and what Dr. Leigh Arnold refers to in her thesis “Robert Smithson’s Utopias: Unfinished Works in Texas and Other (No-)Places” as a “feedback loop rooted in questions of entropy, modes of perception, and imagination.” As friend Isaac Dunne highlighted, there's an interesting parallel here with Bush, who amusingly believes he coined the term “strategery.”