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Claudia Steinberg You were born in Tucson, Arizona, but were drawn to its opposite, New York City – though, to the degree that this city has been built not with brick but with concrete, it is linked to the desert – as both its antithesis and its material reincarnation in the vertical. Has your knowledge of the destructive production process of this ubiquitous building material influenced your relationship to Manhattan, the fabled “concrete jungle”?

Lucy Raven New York is full of all kinds of incredible installations, like this one, just outside the park on my corner. There’s a randomness, but also a utility to many of these temporary sites that is different to how production leaves its mark in the desert. There, you have the sense that something was done and then left alone. In the city, these remnants that belong to no one feel collectively authored – either made or left alone by many, so they have a different kind of charge.

CS With waters rising around it, New York City is in crisis, not least because of its centuries-old efforts to subjugate nature, having blocked and redirected the natural flow of currents. The fortress is now forced to fortify itself even further, or so the engineers believe. Do you see some kind of parable in the creation of this arrogant and now so vulnerable metropolis?

LR This photo was taken on Trump’s last day in office, just before the inauguration of President Biden. In it, you can see newly built high-rises in Long Island City; behind me is the United Nations in Manhattan. In the foreground is my partner’s studio, on which was installed a Trump countdown clock, about to finally expire. The studio flooded during Hurricane Sandy, as did much of New York, and rising sea levels bring more concern with every year. Meanwhile, that building and the other few remaining warehouses along the waterfront are also under constant threat of development, most recently by Amazon. That deal was successfully staved off by protesting citizens’ groups, but big-tech companies have quietly moved into entire neighbourhoods, often near the water, over the last few years. It will be interesting to see how the physical and virtual realities will interact with rising tides, and how private and civic spaces manage something universal, like climate change.

CS Your 2018 film Subterrestrial Cinema starts with a hypnotic artwork by Duchamp of a moving word spiral, before introducing the viewer to the Bingham mine in Utah, the largest excavation site on earth: since 1906, when the Guggenheim brothers began mining there, billions of tons of rocks containing copper and other metals have been extracted. Not only did the mine finance the Frank Lloyd Wright building and the Guggenheim collection, but your film suggests that the museum’s design was inspired by the mine’s downward-spiralling terraces that (despite their inversion of space) evoke the Tower of Babel, as well as Vladimir Tatlin’s unbuilt Monument to the Third International. Of course, in the museum’s case, its upwardly expanding spiral was also meant to convey a spiritual ambition. What are your thoughts on the spiral in art and architecture – from Louise Bourgeois’ swirls, which to her represent control and freedom, to Mario Merz’s Fibonacci-spiral and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty to the famous staircase in the Vatican Museum – and perhaps the swirling spirals on concrete trucks?

LR The spiral has been a generative form for me through many works of my own, and others I’ve been drawn to, and into. I think of Hollis Frampton’s book of essays, Circles of Confusion, as a term to describe what I find insatiable about the spiral – the deeper you get the more disjunctive the relation between space and time. It’s like a loop with an open circuit.

CS You even show the mine’s geological formations as a vertical landscape that seems related to abstract art, like paintings by nature. Do you believe that there is inspiration in the beauty and grandeur of these scarred walls?

LR Definitely. One of the most compelling aspects of this kind of site, an active excavation, is that interior and exterior are constantly being renegotiated as new layers of material are dug into, blasted and shovelled out. It becomes a high-speed geologic reformation, jarring to see in real time.

CS Deserts in the American West are major sites of mining, but also very much the opposite of the subterrestrial, what with the huge open sky, the starry firmament, the probably imaginary UFOs, and the very real surveillance instruments high above, which are all part of the landscape. With Casters X-2 & X-3, your other long-term installation at Dia in New York, you touch on this aspect of the military eye in the sky: klieg lights swoop over the brick walls and the perfectly polished concrete floors of the former marble-cutting factory, and occasionally, unpredictably, the viewer briefly gets caught in a circle of light. The movements are based on WWII-era defence technology that could track an enemy aircraft in any direction. What interested you in this 20th-century technology, which you have said reminds you of drawing captured on film, like Picasso drawing with light?

LR I got interested in working with light in time and motion without the proscenium of a fixed screen or a grounding narrative image. I was thinking about the externalisation of one’s own vision. Also the inversion of a kind of landscape film where the idea, probably preposterous, of “capturing” a location would happen at the site of reception rather than the site of production. In Casters, a horizontal line is projected in the middle of each circle. I thought of these, on their own, as abstracted horizons. When they fleetingly cross just above and below their apparatuses, which happens at times during the two-and-a-half-hour choreography, they draw an “X” or a cross hairs where they meet.

CS You’ve mentioned Canadian experimental filmmaker Michael Snow as an influence in the sense of a complete mapping of that place. Footage of his 1971 film The Central Region is captured by a camera swirling around on a tripod at varying speeds and angles, creating a dizzying and somehow melancholic portrait of an unpopulated landscape that is also linked to surveillance. Seeing that film from the 1970s, it seemed to me just a frantic apparatus spinning around in a lonely landscape, disseminating a sense of terrible alienation. How does your slowly, almost elegantly moving Casters relate to Snow’s agitated aesthetics?

LR For one, I’m using a system he used for his robotic camera arm, which uses an amplified slip ring, which the Whitney Brothers originally exploited for their incredible animated spirals in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. It’s a part the Whitneys took from a decommissioned WWII-anti-aircraft device that allowed it to spin freely without getting the cord tangled. This part enabled us to run all the wiring through the inside of the frames. In this photo of Casters X-2 & X-3, you can see how they also light or watch each other. The movement is extremely slow, as you note. Maybe too slow, too persistent. This, to me, creates another mode of alienation.

CS Snow’s seminal work of “post-human cinema” was made around the same time as Walter De Maria’s film and other major land-art projects. You have expanded on their heritage not by creating a site-specific work, but rather by observing and visually analysing actions by other people – or industries – forced upon the natural environment. Was there a kind of romance in land art that we have lost in the Anthropocene where nature as we have known it is disappearing, and with it the idea of the sublime?

LR I think the sublime still very much exists, and startles me constantly, in the most unexpected moments. Perhaps what’s been transformed is our encounter with it, which must now have already sublimated within it, a previous encounter with, as you put it, actions of other people or industries.

CS With Ready Mix, you focus on the landscape as the victim of excessive extraction, but the harsh desert climate has also been employed as a deterrent against illegal immigrants. Since the urban border crossings were closed under Clinton, the desert has become a cemetery. There are also soldiers training in the desert in order to use their destructive skills and machinery in wars in other deserts, and all that is taking place far from most people’s radars: secrets in the wide-open space. Are your roving light beams at Dia in their aggressive role as surveillance instruments the flip side to the industrial maltreatment that the desert landscape suffers in Ready Mix?

LR The physical harshness of the desert, alongside the brutal treatment of illegal immigrants, is very much present in that part of the country; it often doesn’t look like the imaginary of that scene – searchlights scanning the border – though of course that also happens. Like the look of heavy industry, there can be something happening, but it’s not totally clear what, even when you’re looking right at it. This is a photo of some scorpions I took under a black light at the Desert Museum in Tucson when visiting my parents. It shifts what would blend entirely into the terrain into the position of subject, of protagonist.

CS The artist Andrea Zittel moved to the desert from Brooklyn because she was drawn to the barren land as the refuge of outcasts and poor people, as a place of modest dreams. Has that social aspect of the desert interested you at all?

LR There’s a tendency to look at the desert with a certain romance that depends on forging a new identity in relation to what’s out there and on keeping one’s distance from the histories that contributed to the present situation. I’m very interested in the social history of the West – as idea, myth, image and material.

CS Twenty-three-thousand-year-old human footprints have just been discovered in the desert of New Mexico, considerably lengthening the period before white colonialists claimed that “empty” place as their own. Does the violent history of colonialism play a role as a subtext in your examination of the American West?

LR Yes. I took this photo while on a pre-production trip for my next film on an explosives-testing range in New Mexico. It shows a concrete tube filled with sand bags to dull the impact of ballistics weapons testing aimed at its other end.

CS In 1969, Walter De Maria made a 28-minute film Hard Core, a series of 360-degree slow pans in the Black Rock Desert with a soundtrack of thundering, growling beats. His “hard Western”, as you call it, ends suddenly with staccato images of men in cowboy hats firing their guns, followed by a stop sign at an intersection in the wide-open landscape. You have added another half hour of flashing images between dark frames, including the dismantling of a car carcass, as well as a percussion soundtrack by Deantoni Parks, who fused and augmented the authentic machine sounds of Ready Mix with his own instrumentation. What prompted this homage and continuation of De Maria’s work?

LR When I found out that De Maria started as a drummer, and played with the proto-Velvet Underground band the Primitives with Lou Reed, John Cale and Tony Conrad, it reformed my understanding of interval in his work. What I’d always intuited as somehow violent in its performance of measurement became embodied differently when I connected the rhythm of drumbeat – his own body’s gestures – to those works. Seeing Hard Core, in which the two cowboys you mention are played by De Maria and Michael Heizer, was a way into thinking about a performance I’d been invited to do by Dia for its “Artists on Artists” series. I invited Deantoni Parks to collaborate as I’d recently seen him perform in New York and had been blown away. I immediately felt an affinity, but wasn’t sure he would know who Walter De Maria even was. It turned out Deantoni was John Cale’s drummer. We went from there, and are very much still going.

CS Ready Mix breaks up the production of concrete into a series of streamlined steps, almost completely devoid of human beings. That exclusion, as well as the black-and-white film itself and the uniformity of the material in its different stages, is an abstraction, which you see as a valuable tool in contemporary art. Does that abstraction influence the understanding of the process?

LR It’s a way to detach from a cerebral understanding of the process, which I’m not interested in supplying. I’m invested in how and where abstraction rubs up against concrete materiality and process. In this case, it was less about the individual steps of the process conveying information than about the relation of time (speed of image capture) to material within each step, and a blur that became an artefact of those decisions.

CS The desert is associated with stillness, but you reveal it, embodied in the mine, as a site of frantic activity, driven at a pace that, when measured against the internal human clock, appears to be cruel. I was reminded of the slightly too fast pace that Amazon imposes on its workers or even the accelerated speed option for listening to podcasts on a cell phone. Revealed as one of the many tortures that capitalist production imposes on us, and on nature, it’s what you call the corporatised speed of production and reception. In your 2009 film China Town, you countered this mode by slowing the viewing process: the film is built from thousands of single frames. What other means have you employed to avoid a narrative of heroic industrial production enthralled with the tempo of modernity, as in 20th-century propaganda films or celebrations like Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City?

LR I do love city symphonies, including Ruttmann’s, but I prefer to think of Dziga Vertov’s films that way. What he called “film things” or rhythmic combinations of frames, though I didn’t know about them at the time, said so much. They contain the musicality of a symphony without losing the discord of industrialisation. In China Town, one of the strategies was interruption: using still frames to track a disjunctive global process we nonetheless think of as a commodity “flow”. ◉