Landscape and Perception in Doug Wheeler’s PSAD Synthetic Desert III (1971/2017)

Abstract

American artist Doug Wheeler’s immersive installation PSAD Synthetic Desert III was originally conceived in 1971, yet it was not exhibited publicly until 2017. In this work, Wheeler uses various aspects of light, space, and sound to conjure an experience of the natural desert landscape within the artificial confines of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. In this article, I use philosophies related to the sublime to examine Wheeler’s blend of perceptual abstraction and landscape representation. I identify the various relationships between humanity and nature this artwork might convey. Building off notions of the landscape sublime as established by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century, and as critiqued by contemporary eco-theorists William Cronon, Emily Brady, and Christopher Hitt, I argue that the installation focuses viewers’ attention on their individual, subjective sensations rather than outside realities, encouraging an intellectual distance established by the eighteenth-century philosophers; it also leverages abstraction, exposing the fundamental difference and unintelligibility of nature praised by the later critics. Inside PSAD Synthetic Desert III, one experiences nature simultaneously as a subjective category of human experience and a radical corrective to human illusions of ecological mastery.