Unearthing Buried History with REMOTE VIEWING & Land Art

While filming in Malibu Creek State Park, artist Cauleen Smith wanted to make a grid of pink forensic tape around an ancient tree. A Park Ranger approached Smith and reprimanded her, saying, “You cannot impact the Earth.” The Ranger labeled her as an invasive presence: bringing in foreign materials (tape, gridlines) to alter this protected outdoor space, albeit temporarily. 

The American government has designated State and National Parks as protected outdoor lands, yet who are they being protected from? Who can make marks in the earth, and for what purpose?

Smith’s short film Remote Viewing (2011) challenges audiences to rethink who has the right to shape the land and excavates buried histories of racial violence. Remote Viewing wrestles with destruction, erasure, and the limits of memory. It compels the viewer to consider lost Black histories in the landscape. Smith depicts the wreckage that humans create and imagines that Land Art can serve as a tool for generational healing.

A Violent Burial

In this fourteen minute video, Smith films a bulldozer pushing a schoolhouse into a ditch. The oral history that inspired Remote Viewing comes from Reverend James Seawood. Reverend Seawood grew up in Sheridan, Arkansas, in the 1950s. His narrative recalls the day when the “Negro” schoolhouse was destroyed: “Then, a big bulldozer came and dug a deep hole, and after digging this deep hole, just pushed our beloved school in the hole and covered it up… and it was as though it was never there.”

The opening frames of the film show a California desert with a dusty, red-brown landscape and a spotless white building resting at the edge of a pit. The structure is church-like, with a miniature bell tower and pointed roof. A large green screen stretches behind the building and casts shadows over the structure.

Several minutes into the film, the camera cuts to a zoomed-in view, and we see the white building somehow creeping toward the pit. We do not see what propels this movement, yet the building crawls closer toward the precipice. Finally, the building is halfway over the edge and begins to tip forward into the earth. 

In a flash of white wood and rust-colored dust, the structure falls in, landing with a thunderous roar. We now see that a yellow bulldozer has been pushing this building forward. His task complete, the driver of this machine backs up and steers away from the pit, exiting right. The camera zooms out again as dust floats up from the gashed-open earth.

Finally, the dust settles, and the building is interred in the ground. Although we cannot see into the pit, we can imagine how the structure shattered when forced into its grave, becoming a heap of splintered boards. The film ends, leaving the viewer to ponder this violent burial.

With Remote Viewing, Smith excavates lost Black histories by staging a scene of racial terrorism to exhume memories buried within the earth. This reenactment pushes audiences to consider the limits of mark-making, who has been forbidden from staking claims on the landscape, and how Land Art can permanently alter the natural world.

Reclaiming Landscapes of Trauma

Why stage this event fifty years later, in a new landscape and a new millennium? Coming to terms with the trauma in this environmental history, Smith asks, “What does it mean that your need for erasure would be so intense that you would dig a hole and bury a whole structure underground?” Janice Gump describes the intergenerational trauma of slavery and oppression as a wound that endures. Remote Viewing repeats the act of destruction to render this event visible and resolve the traumatic cycle.

Smith’s work highlights the erasure of Black stories from American history and critiques how news media “buries” incidents of violence against African Americans. Sheridan, Arkansas’s white residents erased the schoolhouse to erase the Black community from their town’s past, present, and future. Rev. Seawood carried this painful memory through his childhood and into adulthood—hidden until he recounted it as part of StoryCorps.

Smith recalls feeling haunted by the pit on her set: “Once the hole was dug, it frightened us. I had to leave it overnight. I had nightmares about finding broken children and dead animals in the hole I’d dug. This is not the relationship to the Earth I want to have.”

Writer and Alice Walker’s biographer Evelyn White also felt constant discomfort when out in nature. Growing up hearing about the murder of Emmett Till, she remembers: “I was certain that if I ventured outside to admire a meadow or feel the cool ripples in a stream, I’d be taunted, attacked, raped, maybe even murdered because of the color of our skin.” 

bell hooks recommends ways that Black Americans can reclaim these splintered connections, saying that while the landscape has been a site of trauma, engaging in communion with it is key to encouraging psychic healing: “Collective Black self-recovery takes place when we begin to renew our relationship to the earth, when we remember the way of our ancestors.” 

Smith’s practice is rooted in such a renewal. She stakes her claim in it and shows the viewer what has been buried within, presenting the landscape as indelibly inscribed with Black life—itself an act of collective self-recovery.

When thinking about why Smith would repeat a hate crime in Remote Viewing, I considered Katherine McKittrick’s history of slavery through the spaces—both mapped and informal, claimed and lost, built and found—where Black women experienced and fought back against enslavement. McKittrick analyses enslaved mother Linda Brent’s hiding place: a garret (or attic room) that was her refuge. Avoiding her abusive owner while keeping watch over her children, Brent hid in her garret to carve out a small space of freedom. The act of hiding was, for her, an act of liberation. 

By contrast, Remote Viewing excavates a story that had been hidden for decades. Smith does not stage this trauma to reveal a precious hiding place. Instead, she shows the destructive forces of white supremacy that forced certain storytellers underground. Smith visualizes Rev. Seawood’s lived experiences and provides a space for him to heal. She repeats the act of destruction to restore this memory and re-ground it in space and time, seeking to halt this endless displacement and asks her audience to consider who has not been able to impact the earth.

Who Can Impact the Earth?

Smith’s choice of title acknowledges the distance between the work’s audience and the event unfolding. Viewers predominately experience Land Art remotely and through surrogates such as videos or photographs. Tourists can visit Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) or Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969). However, to interact with these works in person, the viewer needs disposable time and money.

Most viewers engage with Land Art in a displaced setting—i.e., “remote viewing.” Even though Smith was present when the cinematic schoolhouse was pushed into the ditch, she was also a “remote viewer” of the historical event by recreating it fifty years later.

Returning to the Park Ranger’s condemnation of Smith and his forbidding her from creating an artwork, Smith reflects that she was ultimately grateful for this incomplete work. The project that resulted from that day, titled The Grid, “is a failed video.” She explains, “After spending the day trying not to damage the earth in the Malibu Creek State Park, I recognized monumentality as an aggressive, imperialistic expression of power that has no real relationship to the land or people at all.”

Remote Viewing no longer exists in the landscape and thus stakes a fleeting claim: to unearth Black stories hidden from sight, to salvage a memory, to process trauma, and to impact the Earth, if only for a moment.

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Featured image: Still from Remote Viewing where the two characters see the hole being dug. Image courtesy of Cauleen Smith, 2011.

Dr. Katherine Gregory is an art historian and Visiting Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University specializing in American art from the colonial period through the present. She studies African American art, transatlantic intellectual exchange, and archive theory. Contact.