ART AND GEOLOGY BOOK

When a visual artist such as Rita Deanin

Abbey and a geologist such as G. William

Fiero focus their combined aesthetic, technical, artistic, and scientific abilities on something as overpowering and elusive as the desert country of the American Southwest, the results can be exciting. In fact, in this case, they are.

That particular combination-artist, geologist, and desert—is by no means new.

It was customary for the teams of the United States Geological Survey, as they worked in the arid Southwest under John Wesley Powell's guidance, to include at least one artist. One of these was the most obvious example of a team all by himself, the remarkable Clarence Edward Dutton—artist, geologist, and writer. His accomplishments in the field of "geological aesthetics" (Wallace Stegner's term) leave us in the awkward position of not knowing what to praise him for the most.

His accomplishments also remind us, if we need any reminding, that we have fallen, or plunged into an age of specialization. In order to deal with a universe expanding at an incredible rate, we have a tendency to rely more and more on specialists with narrow shafts of knowledge and skills. And while specialists are necessary in today's world, the tendency to depend upon them to the exclusion of all else is dangerous. Somebody must integrate and synthesize what we learn about ourselves and the world in order to prevent social, cultural, and even personal fragmentation.

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While very loosely within the area of

"geological aesthetics," this work by Abbey and Fiero cuts across many other lines as well, particularly contemporary visual art, theories of perception, and archetypal pat-terns. It is not so much about what is out there in the desert to be seen, as it is about how to see what is out there. And how what is out there can, consciously or sub-consciously, affect the contemporary artist's work.

Learning to distinguish between the kinds of plants, animals, reptiles, insects, geological formations, and other elements which go to make up any one of the deserts of the American Southwest is more than a lifetime job; and sometimes we become so caught up in the effort, just to distinguish things from one another, that we forget the rest of the job. We must also learn to see what these things have in common, those recurrent properties which create, out of great diversity, the harmony we sense in the desert as in, perhaps, no other kind of landscape.

I have been looking at the Southwest's most luxuriant desert-the Sonoran-for more than twenty-five years, trying to see it clearly and see it whole, and of course failing to do either. I have even had the audacity to write about it some, a dangerous thing to do since one's observations on such a subject, once they get into print, can be checked by the specialists and found to be inaccurate. (In an age of specialization, it is much safer for a poet to stick to his or her internal emotional states, which can be lied about with impunity.)