Walking with Intention

Two hundred and fifty million years ago, during the Paleozoic Era, the land where the Tallgrass prairie now grows was buried under the Permian Sea. Shells and invertebrate fossils at times reemerge to remind us of a geological period that the land has not forgotten. This prairie, which once populated 150 million acres of North America, now covers less than four percent of the continent.

During the early nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, the American Tallgrass prairie was still a vast and diverse ecosystem, second only to the Amazonian rainforest. It provided excellent cropland soil for farmer-settlers as well as a rich landscape for large and small domestic animals to forage. But as a result of over tilling and overgrazing, the extensive vertical root system of indigenous grasses, which reached many feet underground into layers of dark humus, was severed, and now the fertile soil could no longer retain its nutrients. Thus impoverished, the soil became unbound and raged as dust storms that thickened the air. Soon, this once admired and productive land was abandoned, not just as a site for cultivation, but also as a source of prid.

In a slice of what remains of the Kansas Tallgrass prairie, artist Janine Antoni, in collaboration with the Spencer Museum of Art and Joey Orr, Curator of Research, has created here-ing, a walking meditation labyrinth. On the site of this work, in Lawrence, the land is still populated by many utilitarian flowering plants, including medicinal and edible herbs—big bluestem, common milkweed, white wild indigo, purple prairie clover, yarrow—while deer, grouse, prairie chickens, jackrabbits, ferrets, rattlesnakes, frogs, salamanders, and more can still be seen.

Like other Janine Antoni sculptures that reflect her fascination with form, materiality, and the process of turning inside parts of the body out—so that she and we can experience that which usually remains hidden, even to ourselves—here-ing “is designed to follow the anatomy of the ear, to increase the notion of an inner journey,” Antoni explains.

Antoni’s here-ing is a labyrinth in the shape of an outer, middle, and inner ear. It is in part inspired by the configuration of the human inner ear, which contains two structures—the “membranous labyrinth” and the “bony labyrinth”—that together support our hearing and our sense of equilibrium. Form follows function in this intricate, bodily configuration, as sound from the world outside reverberates in the inner ear, which is protected by the middle and outer parts of the ear. The outer ear measures 250 ft × 130 ft.

It is designed to make us aware of the complexity, interiority, and particularity of the inner ear—a labyrinthine structure that generates sound. Inspired by this hidden shape, Antoni has deliberately created what she terms a “circuitous path” in order “to give walkers an opportunity to slow down, arrive in our bodies, and enter a receptive state. As we continue to draw the ear with our steps, we listen more deeply.”

Participants enter the labyrinth—laid out on a grid perfected by a design-build class led by Keith Van de Riet from the School of Architecture and Design, University of Kansas—tracing the shape of the outer ear, then the middle ear, and finally the inner ear. The two-mile journey takes an hour to complete. Because this external experience has an internal intention, Antoni asks those who choose to walk the labyrinth to remain silent for the duration of their journey, to enable them to listen to the land and its effect on their spirit and on their thoughts. She hopes that in the process participants will connect with the part of the self that often becomes separated from nature, just as it does from its own inner wisdom. This fissure, experienced by many, might account for the omnipresent and dangerous obliviousness to the Earth—to its needs and those of all living species—an unfortunate condition at the core of the climate catastrophe.

here-ing is a collaborative effort. With the aid of Field Station Manager Sheena Parsons, at each stage of development, the labyrinth has been “walked” into the earth by more than one hundred participants. It is not an “earthwork” or a “land art” sculpture as we understand these terms in relation to the 1960s and 1970s artists who sought freedom from the physical restrictions of the white cube gallery space. Those artists also created ambitious, complexly engineered, and at times demanding projects, but they were often isolated in the wilderness: Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field, Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, and James Turrell’s ongoing, decades-long sculptural transformation of the Roden Crater.

Antoni’s piece has a different, participatory intention. In accord with the historic moment of urgency for the Earth and its diverse species—including humans—many artists have attempted to capture the attention, visually and emotionally, of a technologically distracted audience by engaging not just our minds but also our bodies in their works. Artists are approaching serious societal issues in relation to the Earth in uniquely physical ways, often collaborating across disciplines to combine the latest science with visual and spiritual experiences that have the potential to open the hearts of viewers, transform individual consciousness, and, ultimately, lead to action.

Thus here-ing is an experiential, contemplative, environmentally restorative artwork, envisioned and constructed in collaboration with ecologists, herbalists, architects, designers, otorhinolaryngologists (ear specialists), Indigenous experts on various topics—including the historic and restorative practices of “cultural burns” and Indigenous storytelling—as well as students, faculty, and other environmentalists working in many disciplines. This project is designed not only to remind us that we are often alienated from the land but also to offer a way to heal that rupture, engaging us in a transformative, integrative process as we walk.

Utilizing Antoni’s expertise in the fabrication of things, and in the choreography of people in space, here-ing is a sculpture as well as an ongoing contemplative process and an event. In its scale and engagement of the public, it reflects the influence of Anna Halprin, dancer, choreographer, social activist, and Antoni’s mentor. Halprin’s work transformed dance into social practice. During its many enactments, her famous Planetary Dance involved hundreds of people who often moved together to transform and reclaim a location that had experienced trauma and was in need of healing. In here-ing, Antoni has likewise combined her love of form with deliberate action, attempting to focus our collective consciousness and will on our capacity to actively restore the Tallgrass prairie while we reconnect to our own expansiveness and that of the natural world.

A clearly marked labyrinth, with one way in and one way out, here-ing is not a maze designed to puzzle or confuse, nor is it a site for random meandering. The path and its effect are very deliberate. Participants do not have to stop to consider which way to turn or to fear getting lost. Instead, they can settle into a contemplative state and focus entirely on the inner and outer experiences of being immersed in the prairie and their own meditations. When the grasses are tall—taller than most people—walkers might not know exactly where they are in the totality of the journey through the parts of the “ear.” But they nonetheless can be assured that the path will lead them into and out of the center of the labyrinth, whose complete shape is discernible only in drone shots taken from above or after a revitalizing “controlled burn,” when the charred fields show the outline of the “ear” most distinctly.

In early fall, when the grasses tower over most participants, the labyrinth becomes animated as lizards race in and out of the path, grasshoppers cling to the tips of the tall bluestems, and the backlit Indiangrass grows translucent. On the day of the opening in October 2023, project collaborators gathered to address the participants. Dr. Melinda Adams—who belongs to the N’dee San Carlos Apache Tribe and is the Langston Hughes Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies and Geography & Atmospheric Science at the University of Kansas, as well as a “cultural burn” or “good fire” expert and advocate—explained the process, importance, and outcomes of this Indigenous conservation practice. Ecologists Sheena Parsons, Ben Sikes, and Nathaniel Weickert shared their knowledge of the Tallgrass prairie’s history and its rich trove of medicinal plants, insects, and grasses. Otolaryngologist Hinrich Staecker explained the workings of the ear.

Thousand-year-old labyrinthine structures are part of our collective unconscious. They appear in several historical, mythical, and spiritual contexts and harken back to Greek mythology as well as to pre-Christian and Christian contemplative, mystical traditions. In the fifth century BCE, the historian Herodotus traveled to Egypt to experience the labyrinth of Hawara—the first known labyrinth and one of the great attractions of the ancient world. But the labyrinth that comes most vibrantly to mind, in Western culture at least, is the one fashioned by Daedalus, the great inventor who appears in many Greek myths. Traces of his labyrinth are thought to remain in the excavated basement of the Minoan palace of Knossos in Crete. The Minotaur—a hybrid creature with the body of a bull and the head of a man—is said to have been imprisoned at the center of this mythical labyrinth.

The Minotaur (bull of Minos) was the offspring of a magnificent white bull sent by the god Poseidon to King Minos for sacrifice. But because Minos could not bring himself to kill such a beautiful creature, Poseidon punished him. He caused Minos’s wife Pasiphae to develop an obsessive, unnatural lust for the animal. She asked Daedalus to design an apparatus that would allow her to copulate with the bull. After the Minotaur was born, King Minos sequestered the beast at the center of a labyrinth Daedalus designed. Every nine years, fourteen Athenian youth were sacrificed to the creature to avenge the death of Minos’s son. The Athenian hero Theseus, hoping to end this carnage, volunteered to slay the Minotaur. With the help of Minos’s daughter, Ariadne, and a ball of thread she provided, Theseus was then able to kill the Minotaur, find his way out of its winding path, and to escape alive.

Over time, Christians adopted this concept of a labyrinth and designed walking labyrinths as spiritual paths to lead participants into the unconscious and other deep, and even dark, interstices of their psyches. An image of Theseus slaying the Minotaur was often painted onto the floor at the labyrinth’s center. Later this central image morphed into a depiction of a battle between Christ and Satan: as Theseus was able to slay the Minotaur, Christ, in triumphing over death, was able to kill Satan. From the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, labyrinthine patterns were often laid down as mosaics onto the floors of churches, allowing parishioners who could not make the journey to the Holy Land to walk the path in the nave of the church, accumulating steps equivalent to those of an actual pilgrimage.

In more recent times, some church communities as well as secular spiritual groups have recreated labyrinthine images as sometimes impermanent diagrams laid onto church floors. Those seeking meditation and communion with their inner thoughts, can walk these patterns to enter into a deep state of contemplation, aligning the secular with the spiritual, the conscious with the unconscious.

In late September 2023, the carved boulder that marks the entrance to here-ing was installed. All that remains of many ancient labyrinths are similarly carved stones, placed at the threshold of once ritualized space. In this tradition, local carvers engraved Janine Antoni’s original drawing into the here-ing stone, which sites the entrance and also serves as a finger labyrinth, to allow participants to trace the journey and prepare their minds, bodies, and spirits for the path they are about to follow.

On the day of the opening, Tweesna Rose Mills, of the Shoshone-Yakama-Umatilla Nations, animated the event by singing the “Tobacco Song,” traditional among the Kickapoo people of Kansas: “Father, spirit of tobacco. Show me the Way.” Later, as Mills began her solitary journey into the labyrinth, the tall grasses slowly enveloped her as she continued to sing her own composition, “I’m Coming Home.”

As we, the walkers, began our journey, crossing into the space of the labyrinth to engage the process of here-ing, Antoni stood at the entrance offering a few lines of written text to each participant—a poem, a thought, an “embodiment prompt”—to encourage us to walk in silence and with intention.

Throughout, we were haunted by Mills’s resonant voice receding as she walked deeper into the labyrinth singing, “I’m coming home, I’m coming home . . .” We encountered her embodied presence only once again as we wound our way across the outer and middle ears and entered deep into the inner ear. There, in that small, protected circular space of the cochlea which spirals into itself, Mills and musicians Will Meade and Paulo Zambarano (who had been drumming throughout our journey) continued their performance, making us aware of our eardrums and how they resonate external sounds uniquely in each body.

If the Tallgrass prairie experts are correct, this labyrinth, where the soil has been compressed by the steps of hundreds of walkers, may well remain accessible to participants for a century or more. While addressing urgent environmental needs, building a collaborative community of laypeople and experts, rehabilitating a small piece of prairie—and thus making us aware of the Earth’s potential to regenerate and our potential to assist—this experiential, ephemeral, participatory artwork, surprisingly, may endure as a site of deep contemplation and environmental action for a long time to come.

Carol Becker is Professor of the Arts and Dean Emerita, Columbia University School of the Arts. Her books include: The Invisible Drama: Women and the Anxiety of Change; The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, and Social Responsibility; Zones of Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions, Gender, and Anxiety; Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art; Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production, and most recently a memoir/essay entitled Losing Helen.