Artist Project / APL (Alaskan Pipeline)

On 21 May 1977, the Alaskan Pipeline was completed. The construction process took only two years but the American landscape was forever changed. The 800-mile-long pipeline, half of which is below ground, crosses three mountain ranges, thirty-four major waterways, and 800 small streams. The oil travels at 5.4 miles per hour and takes 6.2 days to cover the length of the entire pipeline. Its starting point is Prudhoe Bay, which is considered one of the most fertile oil regions in the Western hemisphere and has been geologically likened to areas of Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and it ends at the Port of Valdez, the site of the Exxon Valdez spill that dumped thirty million gallons of crude oil into the Pacific Ocean in 1989.

The works presented here are excerpted from a larger project involving forty drawings shown simultaneously at Sara Meltzer Gallery in New York and Els Hanappe Underground in Athens in 2003. The full suite from which these images were chosen depicts the pipeline winding its way through the stark landscape of Alaska—snaking past a landscape littered with corporate logos, populated by animals both real and metaphorical, and occasionally having imaginary interactions with iconic Earthworks such as Michael Heizer’s Double Negative and Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, artworks that share certain formal characteristics with the pipeline, which was built in the midst of Land Art’s heyday. These elements suggest the complex of aesthetic, environmental, and economic concerns that inspired my interest in this unique technological artifact.