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made pure by nature.
    Denes’s
Wheatfield
was soon reaped, and wasn’t around long enough to get drawn into difficult debates about land use or to start looking outdated.
Time Landscape
suffers a different fate. The
Village Voice
reported the atmosphere of one weeding and cleanup day turning slightly sour as the director of a local community alliance declared that “the time has come for something new” and that “Time Landscape is a piece of ’80s art,” all “within earshot of the artist.” It’s true that over the past couple of decades the pursuit of prelapsarian eco-art has gone out of fashion and a fascination with weed-infested urban decay has taken root (see “The Archaeological Park of Sicilian Incompletion,” [>] ). An influential essay by John Patrick Leary on the “exuberant connoisseurship of dereliction” labeled the trend “Detroitism,” because for artists and photographers, that city has become “the Mecca of urban ruins.”
    Time Landscape
and Detroitism are very different starting points, but they both converge on a central worry for urban civilization: How can we live without nature? What do we become without it, or what can we pretend to be? Sonfist never claimed to have the answers, and what
Time Landscape
means has long since escaped his control. Today it is a troubled and paradoxical place but also somewhere that hints at the remorse for lost nature that lies just beneath the surface of even the shiniest and blankest cityscape.

The Aralqum Desert
    44° 45′ 37″ N, 62° 09′ 27″ E
     
    The Aralqum Desert is too new, too large, and its outline too changeable to be on any maps. It’s a desert that used to be called the Aral Sea. The new name is gaining favor, although it’s not quite as exotic as it sounds.
Qum
is Uzbek for “sand.”
    The map captioned “Geography: Physical” is usually seen as an impassive affair when compared to “Geography: Political.” We are used to the latter requiring regular updates but continue to imagine that the physical outlines and natural features of the planet are slow-moving or even rock-solid. The love of “natural places” is, in part, built around the conviction that, unlike our fragile settlements and fickle borders, they are self-reliant and age-old. It’s an outdated perspective, as New Moore (see [>] ) demonstrates, and encourages a belief that natural systems can always cope with change; that when one set of flora and fauna die out, a new set will happily move in. The Aralqum is a natural place, an empty desert, but also an unnatural one that shows that organic adaptation can no longer keep pace with human impact.
    It’s also a place of disconcerting memories. The Aral Sea was once enormous. At 426 kilometers long and 284 kilometers wide, it was the fourth-largest lake in the world. Any schoolchild tracing her finger across the map of Central Asia will still find it and pause and wonder how such a big blue shape could have formed so many miles from the ocean. It was once called the Blue Sea and was first mapped in 1850. Soon the Aral Sea was supporting several fishing fleets and a cluster of new villages, and by the middle of the last century it was fringed by nineteen villages and two large towns, Aralsk in the north and Muynak in the south. Today these towns’ harbors are many miles from water.
    The Aral Sea was fed by one of the longest rivers in Central Asia, the Amu Darya, which flowed north for 1,500 miles to spawn an island-flecked delta. Along with the Syr Darya, which fed the Aral’s northern shore, the Amu Darya pumped the Aral Sea full of fresh mountain water. Soviet planners were not slow to see the potential of these rivers to feed cotton and wheat irrigation systems. Starting in the 1930s, huge channels were constructed, diverting water from both the Amu Darya and Syr Darya and spreading it out over millions of acres of fertile land. One of the Soviet Union’s most eminent experts in desertification, Professor