COlEnE BROOKS
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cided, for example, to invent something that might secure the in–
come needed for his art; his creation, the telegraph, revolutionized
communications and altered at a stroke our experience of time and
space.
(It
did not, however, provide the financial security he sought,
and he continued to tinker as his career as an artist fell into eclipse.)
In the twentieth century Robert Moses, visionary of public works,
transformed the face of New York and, indeed, the nation, with his
extraordinary network of expressways, yet he could not drive a car;
the man who almost single-handedly fostered the modern cult of the
automobile derived only an aesthetic satisfaction from what he had
wrought . And, of course, there is the career of theater artist Robert
Wilson to consider. In terms of the scale of aspiration alone, the
millions of dollars, thousands of man-hours, global satellite relays
and such stipulated for his signature projects (the largely-un–
produced
CIVIL warS,
for instance), Wilson can be characterized
not simply as an artist but as an empire builder, a kind of master
financier-engineer, a sort of Robert Moses, as it were . In these last
figures, particularly, one finds a complex fusion of vision and will–
to-power that is supremely American, marked not by the stormy
megalomania incident to certain other cultures but rather by a cool
resolution that can best be described as
methodical.
Jefferson's notion of "correctness" as the informing principle of
the "canvas" also can be sensed in American art, much ofwhich is in–
fu~ed
with a quasi-scientific rigor that springs from imperatives
which are entirely self-imposed . The work of Jennifer Bartlett, for
instance, is shaped according to exacting specifications that are
prescribed by Bartlett herself; similarly, in the formal extremities of
Wilson's work one senses a temperament at work whose impulses are
pursued with an axiomatic thoroughness, unrelenting in pursuit of
its "ramifications." One thinks also of the photographer Eadweard
Muybridge, transplanted Briton, whose obsessive atomization of the
mechanics of motion entitles him, perhaps, to be termed our first
great formalist. Possibly the most intriguing of such figures is,
however, John Wesley Powell , the nineteenth-century explorer of
the country west of the One Hundredth Meridian. As leader of the
U. S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Rocky Mountain
Region, Powell grew intimately familiar with the then little-known
territory he dubbed "the Arid land ." Settlement in the West, he
slowly realized, must not develop along traditional lines, homesteads
divided (as in the East and Midwest) into quarter-section parcels of
one hundred sixty acres; the arid lands required irrigation and thus
