(W)holes – Volume, horizon, surface – Three intimate geologies

The ideas of holes that emerge through this essay are shaped by experiments with the tensions between artistic (w)holes. In other words, between two artistic created holes, Untitled (Silueta Series, La Ventosa, Mexico) 1976 and Munich Depression, 1969 created by Ana Mendieta and Michael Heizer respectively, and the ‘wholes’ of which they are a part. These musings on holes are composed through three morphologies; volumes, horizons or edges, and surfaces. Through experiences of these holes (at the time of their making and since) an environmental imaginary is forwarded, marked, I argue by intimate geologies that reframe the temporal and spatial scales of the geologies that more usually mark Anthropocene imaginaries.The first tension explored is that between the two artist holes and the Whole Earth images of the same era. I am concerned with the tensions between the planetary scale environmental imaginaries of these images and those forwarded by the holes. The second and third tensions explore gaps in the recreations and records of the ‘original’ landscape-based holes. Ideas of horizon and edge, and of surface offer the means to reflect on the thematisation of loss and on ongoingness, such that what is brought into view is both the ungraspability of the horizons over which our environmental imaginations need to operate, but also an inevitable ongoingness of geological and geomorphological processes. As such, through each morphological discussion the nothing-ness of these holes composes intimate geologies which sit in tension with those ‘geos’ long associated with the planetarity of Whole Earth images.

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